Globalization in World History [4 ed.] 1032572981, 9781032572987

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Globalization in World History

In this fully revised fourth edition, this book treats globalization from several vantage points, showing how these help grasp the nature of globalization both in the past and today. The revisions include greater attention to the complications of racism (after 1500) and nationalism (after 1850); further analysis of reactions against globalization after World War I and in the 21st century; more discussion of student exchanges; and fuller treatment of developments since 2008, including the role of the Covid-19 pandemic in contemporary globalization. Four major chronological phases are explored: in the centuries after 1000 CE, after 1500, after 1850, and since the mid-20th century. Discussion of each phase includes relevant debates over the nature and extent of the innovations involved, particularly in terms of transportation/communications technologies and trade patterns. The phase approach also facilitates analysis of the range of interactions enmeshed in globalization, beyond trade and migration, including disease exchange, impacts on culture and consumer tastes, and for the modern periods policy coordination and international organizations. Finally, the book deals with different regional positions and reactions in each of the major phases. This includes not only imbalances of power and economic benefit but also regional styles in dealing with the range of global relationships. This volume is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of world history, economic history, and political economy. Peter Stearns is Distinguished University Professor of History at George Mason University. For several decades he has regularly taught world history and globalization courses at the undergraduate and graduate level. He has published titles in the Themes in World History series, on subjects including time, human rights, and happiness, with his latest release Punishment in World History.

Themes in World History Series editor: Peter N. Stearns

The Themes in World History series offers focused treatment of a range of human experiences and institutions in the world history context. The purpose is to provide serious, if brief, discussions of important topics as additions to textbook coverage and document collections. The treatments will allow students to probe particular facets of the human story in greater depth than textbook coverage allows, and to gain a fuller sense of historians’ analytical methods and debates in the process. Each topic is handled over time – allowing discussions of changes and continuities. Each topic is assessed in terms of a range of different societies and religions – allowing comparisons of relevant similarities and differences. Each book in the series helps readers deal with world history in action, evaluating global contexts as they work through some of the key components of human society and human life. Education in World History Mark S. Johnson and Peter N. Stearns Human Rights in World History (Second Edition) Peter N. Stearns Food in World History (Third Edition) Jeffrey M. Pilcher The Turkic Peoples in World History Joo-Yup Lee Punishment in World History Peter N. Stearns The Environment in World History (Second Edition) Stephen Mosley Globalization in World History (Fourth Edition) Peter N. Stearns

Globalization in World History Fourth Edition

Peter N. Stearns

Designed cover image: MIAMI, USA - AUGUST, 2019: An Olympic flag flutters above a red athletics track. Lazyllama/Alamy Stock Photo Fourth edition published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Peter N. Stearns The right of Peter N. Stearns to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2009 Third edition published by Routledge 2019 ISBN: 978-1-032-57492-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-57298-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-43961-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003439615 Typeset in Times New Roman by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

PART I

Context1 1 Globalization and the Challenge to Historical Analysis 2 Emerging Patterns of Contact, 1200 BCE–1000 CE: A Preparatory Phase

3 14

PART II

Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE33 3 The Birth of Globalization?

35

4 Transition: The Mongol Period

64

PART III

Protoglobalization69 5 The Main Features of Protoglobalization, 1500–1750 6 A Late-18th-Century Transition PART IV

73 103

Modern Globalization, 1850–1945

113

7 The 1850s as Turning Point: The Birth of Modern Globalization

117

8 The Great Retreat, 1914–45, and a New Transition

153

vi Contents PART V

Contemporary Globalization: The Most Recent Phase and Its Backlash 9 Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s: A New Global History?

161 165

10 A New Retreat?: The Signs of Disruption in the 21st Century  208 11 Conclusion: The Historical Perspective Index

221 225

Acknowledgments

Though it seeks to complicate their approach, this book owes much to the New Global Historians and the Toynbee Society in which they long participated, including the late Bruce Mazlish, the late Raymond Grew, Wolf Schaefer, and Akira Iriye. Various people have assisted in the previous editions, including Craig Hamilton, Laura Bell, John Garnett, and Alexis Frambes. Three scholars offered useful comments on the third edition, for which I am grateful. Special thanks to Sinead Monaghan for assistance with this new edition, and to the Routledge staff, Isabel Voice, and Allison Sambucini, for their combination of encouragement and practical help. Finally, I am grateful to the many undergraduate and graduate students at George Mason University who have participated in discussions about the history of globalization and who have added both data and perspectives.

Part I

Context

Globalization is one of those phenomena that begin well before they are clearly named. The word globalization was first used in English in the 1930s, but its meaning was not clear. It was mainly an English equivalent of a French term, mondialisation, that had been introduced to describe the increased speed of global communication and transportation after the mid-19th century. (A Japanese word for the process was introduced in the 1960s.) In English, use of globalization ticked up a bit in the 1980s, with some application to international business, but its real birth was only in the 1990s. At that point, the term soared in popularity, mainly to define the increased linkages of the post-Cold War world that scholars and journalists thought, or hoped, were beginning to open up. By the early 21st century, many Americans were familiar with the term and could offer a reasonable definition, though they disagreed on whether they approved or disapproved of the process it described. This book focuses on the development of the framework for globalization, arguably over a considerable span of time and in some fairly clear phases – but including the 20th–21st century surge that the word itself was invented to describe. The argument is simple. Grasping the longer history of globalization, and even spending a bit of time deciding when it “really” began, improves an understanding of what the process is all about, why and how it is complicated by different regional reactions, and why it continues to provoke considerable controversy. Arguably, as some historians have contended, globalization has been the most important single process in world history over the past decades or even centuries, changing human life in many ways. Figuring out its dimensions goes some way to grasping one of the basic characteristics of the modern world.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003439615-1

1

Globalization and the Challenge to Historical Analysis

Globalization, which as recently as the 1990s seemed destined to link the world’s regions in ever-tighter connections, has unquestionably hit a number of speed bumps during the past two decades. The recession of 2008, the most serious international downturn since the 1930s, caused second thoughts in many quarters. Growing concerns about racism raised questions about globalization’s role in furthering the exploitation of some groups of people by others. Increasing realization of the environmental crisis and the inadequacy of measures to address it – though this might argue for more global controls – set off another set of warning bells about the overall process that had brought humanity to this point. Great power tensions, including the desire of countries like China, India, and Brazil to shake free from Western dominance, introduced another set of questions about global arrangements. Responses to the Covid-19 pandemic that surged in 2020 not only disrupted international contacts temporarily but highlighted clear limitations to more general global arrangements, as many frightened societies largely ignored wider coordination. Globalization was not dead; indeed, the technologies for interconnection advanced steadily. But it was clearly entering a new and less predictable phase. In fact, globalization has always been a historical process, evolving, changing, and sometimes retreating over a long stretch of time. To be sure, it is possible to jump into the connective framework at any given point – as in the 1990s, when the term itself began to become commonplace for the first time – and talk about the structures involved and debate the advantages and disadvantages of the whole phenomenon. But a fuller grasp of globalization and its impact, and patterns of regional response, requires a deeper examination of changes and continuities over the past several centuries. At the same time, globalization has never been a predetermined process, destined for inevitable advance: it has always involved human choices and resistances, as is so clearly the case today. Historical analysis does not predict the precise

DOI: 10.4324/9781003439615-2

4 Context contours of globalization in the future, but it plays a vital role in evaluating what the phenomenon is all about, and why it provokes such intense – and contradictory – reactions. **** Globalization has long been a subject for dispute. Some observers have seen it as an engine for economic growth and prosperity, or a framework for the protection of human rights and even a peaceful global community. Others have blasted it as a source of corporate control and impoverishment, a threat to cultural integrity, a terrible and destructive force. Specific debates also involve globalization’s regional impact in a “post-colonial” but still very unequal world. From a British journalist, Martin Jacques: “At the heart of globalization is a new kind of intolerance in the West towards other cultures, traditions and values, less brutal than in the era of colonialism but more comprehensive and intolerant.” From Tadashi Yanai, a Japanese businessman: “Globalization is criticized from q Western perspective, but if you put yourself in the shoes of people in the developing world, it provides unprecedented opportunity.” Here too, contradictory arguments flourish. In recent years, hostile takes on globalization have been gaining ground in many different countries and from many different angles. From the left: globalization promotes economic and political systems that “threaten progressive goals, and should be recognized as such and fought at every level.” “It does not serve the interests of the vast majority of the people on the planet and is both economically and environmentally unsustainable.” Its menace is “self-evident.” From the right: globalization has “left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache” “We reject globalism” (Donald Trump). Globalization tears down the precious values of the nation, making Europe, for example, a “standardized cluster” open to influences from all over the world (Viktor Orban, the authoritarian Hungarian leader): “Globalization, by aggravating the crisis of meaning, has led to the enhancement of fundamentalist entities like the ISIS (terrorist) group.” From a variety of angles: globalization is “harming us more than helping us. Why are so many horrors happening at once in the world?” And finally, along with the attacking chorus, another important note. While some people, whether for or against globalization in principle, argue that the process is irresistible – as the Vietnamese president recently stated, “rejecting globalization was like rejecting the sunrise” – critics now argue that the process can be successfully opposed. The aura of inevitability may have faded in favor of beliefs that new nationalism, or new radicalism, can turn the tide.

Globalization and the Challenge to Historical Analysis  5 Is globalization entering a dramatic new phase? And would this be a good thing? How can the history of globalization help sort out the surprising array of contradictory judgments on what the phenomenon is all about? *** Globalization is quite simply the intensification of contacts among different parts of the world and the creation of networks that, combining with more local factors, increasingly shape human life. The process is a blend of economic, technological, sociocultural, and political forces, though globalization terminology is often used to focus primarily on economics – the integration of national economies into an international economy through trade, foreign direct investment, capital flows, migration, and the spread of technology. Globalization is no mere abstraction: it has real human meaning. It refers (in the financial crisis of 2008) to Americans who woke up at 3 in the morning to check Asian stock markets because they knew these would influence and foreshadow Wall Street later in the day. Globalization refers to global McDonalds, with 31,000 locations worldwide, all with common emphasis on fairly greasy food served quickly and (in principle at least) cheerfully. Or to Starbucks, with 22,500 sites including 10,000 outside North America – often challenging local coffee house traditions that go back over 400 years. It refers to a quarter of the world’s population (regardless of time zone) glued to televised accounts of World Cup soccer. It refers to the millions of American kids playing with Japanese toys like Hello Kitty or (not too long ago) Pokémon, or the charitable contributions from around the world pouring into disaster areas like tsunami-hit Southeast Asia or Katrina-devastated New Orleans. It refers … – the list is long indeed, with an impressive range of arenas and activities. The concept of globalization was not coined by historians but rather by other social scientists, economists in the lead. These theorists in turn, implicitly or explicitly, argued that globalization identified a phenomenon whose nature and consequences were quite novel, leading to very different interregional interactions and human experiences from anything that had occurred before. Most of them also initially contended that this global innovation was largely a good thing, producing not only a different but also a better world; yet it was also clearly possible to make the same claims about novelty and conclude that the results were unfortunate – the world is indeed changing dramatically but getting worse. Either way, globalization has always had historical meaning in suggesting a significant movement away from earlier frameworks. And this, of course, is where historians and historical perspectives come in. How new is globalization compared with previous patterns of contact among societies in different regions of the world? What’s the difference between a multinational corporation – one of the bearers of globalization today – and the

6 Context international corporation of the late 19th century, or indeed the international trading company of the 16th century? No one can contest that contemporary globalization harbors unprecedented features – the Internet is purely and simply new; the capacity for a quarter of the world’s population simultaneously to watch the same sports event is purely and simply new. But claims about globalization as a huge departure in the human experience go beyond these narrower examples, and they should depend on a very careful analysis about how the recent globalization process stacks up against earlier changes in contacts and their results. The historical assessment becomes all the more crucial if we are in fact entering a significant new globalization phase, in which resistance and retreat will take center stage. How new is this kind of tension over globalization, and are there any revealing precedents? Evaluating the origins of globalization – when the process really began – also opens the question of what caused it. Some discussions of globalization seem to assume that it dropped out of the sky, with at most a few generalized references to changes in technology. In fact, of course, a variety of human decisions are involved, for example in determining not only what technologies to use (some societies in the past have in fact resisted global devices) but how local policies coordinate, or fail to coordinate, with larger global forces like epidemic disease or the popularity of global sports. One way to ask about globalization’s origins, in fact, is to determine the point at which the motivations to accelerate global exchanges became so compelling that further expansion of actual contacts was virtually assured. It’s at least possible that more careful attention to causes and motivations must push chronology considerably back in time, without ignoring the importance of more recent developments, like the Internet, in shaping an additional stage in the globalization process. Root causes, in other words, may pre-date important but more surface manifestations. Clearly, globalization and its current uncertainties cannot be fully understood without historical context that will trace when the various strands of the process first took shape and why, and that will also evaluate results and resistances in the past as well as the present. The goal is to use a discussion of how globalization relates to prior patterns of interregional contacts to determine more precisely what is really new about the recent developments, particularly beyond specific technologies, and whether the current changes constitute in fact a huge jolt of the unexpected or, rather, an acceleration of experiences to which many societies had already adjusted. To be sure, historians (like most scholars) like to argue, and globalization has already provoked some sharp debates. Thus, one group, calling themselves the “new global” historians, urges that recent globalization is indeed a huge change, perhaps one of the greatest in human history. The group tends to opt for a slightly more generous time span than some non-historians prefer, pointing back to the 1950s or so for the onset of the contemporary current. But they’re adamant about seeing the phenomenon as a great gulf between present and future

Globalization and the Challenge to Historical Analysis  7 conditions, on the one hand, and the bulk of the human past on the other. Indeed, they like to distinguish themselves from world historians, arguing that their “global” history alone captures the uniqueness of recent change instead of burying it in the catalogue of centuries. Against this, though somewhat less fiercely, another cluster of historians has begun to urge that it’s the later 19th century, not the later 20th, that should be seen as the true globalization seedbed. Against both, one eminent world historian, David Northrupp, contends that it’s around the year 1000 CE that human history divides between largely separate or regional experiences (before) and increasing contact, imitation, and convergence (after); and if this is true, more recent changes associated with globalization form merely the latest iteration of this basic and long-standing momentum. This last approach calls attention to the contributions of major societies like China or the Arab world in creating the initial conditions for globalization, rather than placing disproportionate emphasis on Western initiatives. Finally, and fairly recently, a number of historians have begun to argue that globalization should be seen as emerging in phases (one of the major studies is in fact entitled The Three Waves of Globalization), rather than trying to pinpoint one burst of innovation. These books have the great merit of moving our vision away from an exclusive focus on essentially contemporary developments, as in the new global history approach. Whereas the globalization of sports clearly begins in the late 19th century, the globalization of trade arguably goes back much farther. We may be better able to evaluate the impacts of globalization on the human condition more accurately if we look for a more gradual accumulation of new patterns rather than just debating about the origins of the whole process. *** This book rests on the claim that globalization has become one of the defining features of world history – indeed, probably the most important single feature – but that it emerges from a more complex and longer-standing process of change. It picks up on the idea of stages or waves of particularly important change, but adds careful attention to chronologically earlier precedents and to the idea of a sequence of key steps. It also notes earlier patterns of resistance, which can place current attacks in clearer perspective. In dealing with globalization historically, the book also places the process, appropriately enough, in a clearly global context. Modern globalization has been disproportionately connected to Western norms, at least until very recently, but the basics clearly pre-date Western leadership just as the process, today, is at least partially escaping Western control. Finally, as against any single schema, the book urges the need to recognize the complexities involved in figuring out how globalization has emerged over time. Can a historical approach also help us sort out the advantages and disadvantages of globalization, cutting through some of the passions about gains and losses? Certainly, when globalization is seen unfolding over time, it is possible to note changes in the winners and losers and in the aspects of the process that

8 Context are most contestable. History does not say, conclusively, whether contemporary globalization is on balance bad or good, but it can suggest why evaluation has become so complicated and also why different regions, as well as various political factions, take different positions on the subject. Potential Turning Points In dealing with major changes in global contacts and processes from 1000 CE onward, the chapters that follow pay particular attention to four major turning points: around 1000, around 1500, around 1850, and of course in recent decades (with attention to a few other partial transitions as well, particularly in the 13th and then the 18th centuries). This approach also highlights attention to periods in which globalization had to retreat – for example, after World War I and arguably today – another reminder that globalization has never been an automatic process. Very few historians have really argued for globalization before 1000 (though as we will see there are some diffuse gestures in this direction), but even here there are a few issues to consider and certainly a need to establish a backdrop for the greater complexity in trading and contact patterns thereafter. The goal is to show how globalization in part flows from prior change – to see it as part of a sequence of developments, with some ongoing motives and impacts attached – but also, through the same approach, to highlight features that are demonstrably and significantly novel. Each stage of globalization, including the most recent one, involves a combination of continuity and change from past patterns, rather than some inevitable march toward greater world integration. This approach will also open some other kinds of discussion that an all-ornothing approach to globalization – either dramatically new or old hat – tends to obscure. In the first place, it can help sort out regional experiences. Every serious analyst of globalization, even the most enthusiastic, urges recognition of the interaction between regional and global factors. And it’s quite clear that different societies have different reactions to globalization, as a whole process and in terms of some of its constituent parts (like immigration or consumer culture). A more explicitly historical approach shows how these differences develop, and even suggests that some societies formed basic commitments for or against globalization at different points in time. Japan, for example, made key decisions on relationships with the rest of the world after 1868 that have clearly conditioned its responses to the more recent rounds of globalization later in the 20th century. Parts of the Middle East or Africa, in contrast, have probably faced core issues more recently, whereas China arguably postponed full consideration of globalization until 1978. Regional issues around globalization are not modern alone: each of the following chapters on stages of globalization or “preglobalization” will include specific discussion of the major regional variants involved in that time period. The historical approach also assists in dis-aggregating globalization in terms of constituent parts, each with a somewhat different historical background. This is where the importance of seeing globalization in terms of the accumulation

Globalization and the Challenge to Historical Analysis  9 of different patterns of contact, rather than as a single framework, emerges strongly. Migration and disease exchanges, for example, are important parts of contemporary globalization, and as such they should be analyzed in terms of how they contribute to change; but as basic processes they go way back in human history. Global environmental impact (as opposed to more purely regional results of human activity), on the other hand, and global movements to protect the environment, are much newer. Definable global political arrangements (in contrast to more traditional relationships among nations) fall a bit in between, older than global environmentalism but far younger than disease exchange. For globalization is both an intensification of the range and speed of contacts among different parts of the world and an expansion of the kinds of activities intimately involved in global interactions. Both aspects help explain why global developments play an increasingly active role in shaping human lives, which is the key reason to study the phenomenon in the first place. They explain also why globalization, even if ultimately judged to be a novel force, is not entirely new – and why resistance has historical precedents as well. Contacts among different societies have increasingly become the key focus in world history scholarship and teaching, for they commonly involve such interesting tensions and attractions and so often produce changes in all the societies involved. Globalization connects this core interest to the present by forcing analysis not just of specific contact episodes but of how contact patterns built up into durable systems and motivations. Globalization today is partly the result of conscious planning, but it also reflects the ambitions and daring and greed of many people in the past who knew they wanted to reach out for new goods or new ideas or new conquests without having any idea that what they were doing would someday amount to a new world system. By the same token, explicit hostility to globalization also builds on the past, on earlier efforts to argue that too much contact risked loss of identity and loss of control. Isolation and Contact The pull to separate but also the pull to connect both go far back in human history. Separation resulted from the wide dispersion of human bands, in turn a function of the demands of a hunting and gathering economy. Hunting and gathering groups, generally about 60–80 strong, usually required upward of 200 square miles to operate – depending of course on climate and other conditions. This in itself tended to create substantial open space between one group and the next, which in turn could encourage the development of distinct habits and identities. Furthermore, the same conditions impelled frequent migration, a pattern that took shape among early human species, well before the advent of Homo sapiens sapiens, and then applied to this latest species as well. For every relatively small expansion in population would force some members of a hunting and gathering group to move beyond current territory, to look for additional sources of food. By the time Homo sapiens sapiens began to move out of its original home in

10 Context East Africa, dispersion through migration developed quite quickly, as the species moved not only to other parts of Africa but to the Middle East and thence to other parts of Asia and Europe, to Australia (using a land shelf extending from Southeast Asia, that has long since been submerged but that for a time allowed a relatively small journey over water), and (by 25,000 BCE) across the then-existing land bridge between Siberia and Alaska and surprisingly rapidly onward to other parts of the Americas. By 10,000 BCE, right before the advent of agriculture, the roughly 10 million people in the world had populated virtually all inhabitable areas. Several Pacific islands still lay vacant, including Hawaii; New Zealand was untouched; Bermuda would not be discovered until European voyages in the early modern centuries. But there were small bands of people almost everywhere else. This meant, obviously, that huge distances began to separate different groups. A few, like the Aborigines of Australia, would be cut off entirely from other population centers until modern times. Others were less isolated, but could easily find contacts with people outside a specific region unusual and possibly threatening. The isolation emphasis should not, of course, be overdrawn. Few small hunting and gathering bands were entirely separated from larger regional networks. While local languages might develop (there used to be far more different languages in the world than there are today), most of them related to larger language groups, like Bantu, or Indo-European, which in turn meant that communication among many groups was not forbiddingly difficult. Within a single region, certain hunting bands might regularly come into contact for purposes of selfdefense (or aggression), mate selection, or other social and trading purposes. It remains true, however, that it is not entirely inaccurate to emphasize the decisive quality of dispersion and differentiation of the world’s human population on the eve of agriculture. Sheer distance was challenge enough, in the long centuries when people could move about only on foot (even granting the superior walking ability of earlier humans compared with their contemporary counterparts) or on crude boats. But distance also combined with dramatically different habits, localized religions, and linguistic patterns to make contact and communication extremely difficult, often promoting proudly separate small-group identities and considerable fear of strangers as well. Larger contact networks – even far short of globalization – would have to contend against these localizing factors. In certain ways, agriculture could make aspects of these localizing tendencies even worse, for it tied groups not just to a general locality but to very specific property, often an individual village. Hunters and gatherers, after all, had to move around at least within a circumscribed region, which could facilitate impulses toward wider migration. Agricultural villagers, in contrast, were often linked to specific properties passed from one generation to the next through inheritance and a family cottage. Deep cultural attachments to particular villages could readily develop, making even the next village down the road slightly suspect, and strangers from greater distances truly ominous. To be sure, some villagers traveled at least a bit in order to market some goods or seek temporary employment elsewhere; and

Globalization and the Challenge to Historical Analysis  11 when crowding impinged, some would move away altogether. It’s important not to overdo the localized parameters. It remains true, even in the present day with busses and other modern amenities facilitating travel, that some villagers (often, particularly women) rarely if ever get more than a few miles from their home turf, seeing no purpose and possibly some real threat in exploring further. Scattered populations and highly regional habits and cultures could thus be confirmed by the advent of agriculture. It would take much time and effort to build regular contact networks simply within larger regions (like China’s ultimately fabled Middle Kingdom or India’s subcontinent), not to mention interregional connections. World history, in a real sense, began on a local level, and even today has not entirely escaped these confines. On the other hand, reasons for wider contacts existed early as well, and at least some individuals pursued them even before we have any clear record of how they moved around. At the most basic level: regional isolation never introduced so many genetic modifications within the species Homo sapiens sapiens that interbreeding could not occur, as happened with so many other species that were more locally defined. We do not always know the nature or specific timing of some early contacts – for example, when basic foods were exchanged from one region to another – given lack of precise records, but it is clear that some daring initiatives were involved. The most obvious lure to pull people away from purely regional interactions involved goods that could only be obtained through more distant ventures. Rare decorative materials might be a lure, like gold or precious stones. The advent of the use of bronze, after 4000 BCE, forced considerable travel in search of tin, one of the key alloys of this composite metal. People in the Middle East ventured into Afghanistan and possibly as far as Britain to seek regular supplies. Soon also, knowledge of valuable spices that could only be obtained from certain localities drove considerable long-distance trade. Once it was established that goods of this sort were worth the risk and cost of travel, other specializations could develop, including ultimately manufactured goods based on the traditions and ecologies of particular regions, which would expand this motivation still further. Contact could also generate knowledge of food products that might be imported to the benefit of local populations. We know that somehow foods native to parts of Southeast Asia (bananas, yams, and coconuts) were brought to Africa very early in the agricultural phase of human history, and once planted in Africa, possibly via Madagascar, they became vital food staples. This means that there was some major interregional contact, at least occasionally, several thousand years ago: precise dates and certainly precise mechanisms are unclear. Similar kinds of benefits could result from learning about, and exporting, domesticated animals. China’s knowledge of horses, and for a considerable time an ongoing source of supply, came from contacts with Central Asia; a Southeast Asian pig was brought to Madagascar. The opportunity to learn about basic goods, beyond trade items, could easily spur a quest for wider ventures.

12 Context Ultimately, it became obvious also that other kinds of learning could result from long-distance ventures, when particular regions became known for particular kinds of cultural strength. It’s hard to pinpoint when student and scholarly travel began – and patterns would long involve only a few individuals, not larger cohorts – but Greeks were visiting Egypt to learn about mathematics early in Greek history, and it was not too long after that when individuals from places like China began to go to India to seek Buddhist wisdom. Knowledge, in other words, added to trade and products in motivating outreach. Harder to calculate, but attached to these more specific spurs, could be simply a quest for adventure and new experience, without a precise calculus of what social or personal gains would result. The confines of life in villages or even early agricultural cities could seem limited, sometimes even stifling, and a few individuals undoubtedly looked to wider horizons for personal reasons. Details here are hard to come by, for almost none of the most ambitious early travelers left any record of their motivations. We know, for example, that in the 5th century BCE a Phoenician named Hanno, with a crew, sailed through the Mediterranean and down the first part of Africa’s Atlantic coast to Sierra Leone and possibly as far as Nigeria – but we don’t know why he did it, and what kind of personality would push him into what, for him, must have been the real unknown. The fact that fanciful beliefs developed about many less familiar parts of the world, populating them with mythical beasts and bizarre human habits, might convince many people that it was best to stick close to home, but it might also have challenged a few to go out and see for themselves. Finally, of course, purely local conditions could generate pressures to reach beyond conventional confines. Population crowding, exhaustion of local resources, and military ambitions could push groups into patterns of migration or invasion that, in some instances, could move them considerable distances and produce a host of new (and often unwelcome) contacts for local populations. Nomadic herdsmen from places like central Asia were often the sources of these new connections, spilling over into incursions into the Middle East, India, China, or Europe, as with the movement of Indo-European peoples into India and the Mediterranean before about 1200 BCE or, a bit later, the surge of Slavic migrations into Russia and east central Europe. These migrants might ultimately settle down, but for at least a considerable time they would challenge existing cultural and political conditions and provide new linkages with more distant regions. Early contacts, whether for trade or scholarly discovery or adventure, could easily begin to trigger other changes, which in turn would encourage additional ventures to reach beyond the locality and region. This further process developed slowly, however, as so many people were enmeshed in local concerns that the motives and benefits of more extensive ventures remained simply out of reach. It remains true that a real pull to develop some connections among relatively far-flung parts of the world emerged early on, and it recurrently tugged against the dispersion and localism of the initial world history framework. Neither the motivations nor the institutions or technologies existed to create a truly global

Globalization and the Challenge to Historical Analysis  13 outreach through the initial millennia of human development, but they could certainly produce experimentation and change. Localism long predominated, but not without recurring and sometimes productive tensions with people who saw benefits in exploring wider horizons. This was the context from which globalization would ultimately emerge. Further Readings K. O’Rourke and J. Williamson, “When Did Globalization Begin?” European Review of Economic History 6 (2002); Paul James and Manfred Steger, “A Genealogy of ‘Globalization’: The Career of a Concept,” Globalizations 11 (2014); Adam McKeown, “Periodizing Globalization,” History Workshop Journal 63 (2007); Jan Pieterse, “Periodizing Globalization: Histories of Globalization,” New Global Studies 6 (2012); Frederick Cooper, “What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian’s Perspective,” African Affairs 100 (2001). Excellent histories of globalization include A.G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (New York, 2002); Bruce Mazlish, The Idea of Humanity in a Global Era (New York, 2008) and A New Global History (New York, 2006); Diego Olstein, Thinking History Globally (New York, 2008) and A Brief History of Now: the past and present of global power (New York, 2021); Robbie Robertson, The Three Waves of Globalization (L: A History of Developing Global Consciousness (London, 2003); Jurgen Osterhammel, Niels Peterson, and Dona Geyer, eds., A Short History of Globalization (Princeton, 2005); Jeffrey Sachs, The Ages of Globalization (New York, 2020). See also Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: commodities in cultural perspective (Cambridge, 1986); Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, 1985). On world systems: Robert, Denemark, J. Friedman, B.K. Gillis and G. Modelski, eds., World System History: The Social Science of Long Term Change (London, 2000); Christopher Chas-Dunn and Eugene N. Anderson, eds., The Historical Evolution of World Systems (New York, 2004); and Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gillis, eds., The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? (London, 1993). See also Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Structures (Newbury Park, CA, 1992). For an important alternative to a globalization approach to current history, Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate (New York, 1996) On fairly recent patterns, Alfred Eckes and Thomas Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century (Cambridge, 2003); and Akira Iriye, Global Community: the role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley, 2004); Barry Gills, ed., Globalization in Crisis (New York, 2011); Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA, 2020).

2

Emerging Patterns of Contact, 1200 BCE–1000 CE A Preparatory Phase

Historians take great delight in finding evidence that crucial aspects of the human experience started earlier than experts once thought. This is part of their effort to bring the past alive by making it unexpectedly relevant to more recent interests, and also to counter a modern tendency to exaggerate the extent that most of what we see around us is brand new. Thus historians of medieval Europe, intrigued by the popularity of the Renaissance, long ago began to find “renaissances” in the 12th century. Modern mass consumerism, once thought to be a product of industrialization later in the 19th century, turns out to have started in Europe in the 17th–18th centuries, well before industrialization, and now historians are discovering consumer revolutions as early as the 14th century. The sexual revolution hailed or lamented in the 1960s turns out to have started in the 1940s and 1950s – and so it goes. Even the industrial revolution is now preceded by an “industrious revolution” that began more than a century earlier (not only in Europe but possibly in Japan as well). The list of topics where historians have revised initial beliefs about the origins of a phenomenon is a long one. Sometimes the resulting findings are superficial or debatable; sometimes (as with consumerism) they seriously reorient the ways we think about the past and about the causation of major change. It is not surprising, then, that a few historians have argued not only that globalization is not brand new – many would agree here – but that it goes back as far as 5,000 years ago, the point at which one scholar, Andre Gunder Frank, has claimed to find the origin of the modern world economy. And indeed, soon after the advent of agriculture, merchants from the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent did begin to engage in some bartering, for example seeking precious stones; this was the case when tradesmen from Mesopotamia, in presentday Iraq, reached out to their counterparts in what is now Pakistan. But to go from firm evidence of an interest in trade to a claim of globalization is too far a stretch – one that ignores those aspects of globalization that depend not just on the existence of occasional exchange but on significant and regular levels of trade and accompanying contacts even beyond trade.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003439615-3

Emerging Patterns of Contact, 1200 BCE–1000 CE  15 This chapter tackles the first set of issues in the effort to put globalization into historical perspective: the distinction between undeniable and interesting interregional contacts emerging early in the agricultural phase of human history, and the fact that these contacts cannot be construed, by any plausible stretch of the imagination, as constituting a preliminary form of globalization. If we push globalization back to the first emergence of regular trading patterns, we risk losing any distinctive meaning for the phenomenon – and that’s the case with the undeniably interesting developments up to about 1000 CE. While hardly constituting even a primitive form of globalization, early commerce did generate important precedents and motivations that can provide a backdrop to the more decisive changes that globalization involves, and these precedents form the focus of this chapter. Indeed, in discussing the important preliminaries that had indeed been established early in the Common Era, we can also begin to clarify what additional innovations globalization would involve. World historians, with their deep and growing interest in contacts, have devoted impressive energies to uncovering and highlighting trade and other connections relatively early in human history. The effort can be complicated by problems of evidence: we know about early contacts mainly on the basis of products from one region that have been found in another. For example, cowrie shells collected in the Indian Ocean as early as 1400 BCE have been found in China, where they were greatly valued and ultimately used as a form of money. Less surprisingly, a number of precious stones from India and Afghanistan, again dating well before the Common Era, have been unearthed along the Mediterranean coast of the Middle East. So it is clear that trade was occurring, in some cases over fairly long distances – but there is no real record beyond the remaining artifacts, which inevitably raises questions about whether some other early trade patterns existed but have yet to be discovered. Similar uncertainties are attached to the clear evidence of food exchanges, where products native to one area – like present-day Indonesia – were brought to places like Africa early on, and adopted into local agriculture. We know this happened, but specifics are lacking. By the 2nd century BCE, however, the situation clearly began to change, and there is evidence to match. Long-distance trade started to occur with greater regularity, leaving records not only through surviving products but also through contemporary commentary on the delight that some exotic goods caused for their upper-class consumers, along with some criticism of the waste and frivolity involved. One trading artery has won particular attention: the Silk Road (more properly, Roads), generating understandable fascination with the exchanges and trade centers that linked producers in Western China with buyers ultimately as far away as Mediterranean Rome. Indeed, the Silk Road has arguably won disproportionate attention to the detriment of awareness of other, equally important, contact routes that also sprang up well before modern times. Not surprisingly, a few historians have gone on to argue that these early exchanges became so

16 Context entrenched that they virtually guaranteed further and intensifying contacts later on – in some cases suggesting that the result already added up to the first form of globalization. Though more plausible than the claims of 5000 years of globalization, this still goes too far, and can in fact be needlessly confusing. However, the establishment of Silk Road trade but also regular exchanges in the Indian Ocean did provide an active backdrop to what would later emerge as globalization’s first definable phase, providing precedents and motives that would be picked up and elaborated several centuries later. Without overdoing the range or intensity of the contacts involved, the precedents do deserve a closer look. The big challenge for most regions before 1000 CE, amid the predominant localism of early agricultural societies, was to build networks within larger regions – like the Mediterranean basin or the Middle East or China – that would facilitate trade and cultural and political exchange. Efforts to reach beyond the major regions, though they did exist, had virtually no significance for the vast majority of the human population. The principal focus of the great classical civilizations, like Persia, India, or Rome, centered on expanding internal regional contacts, not in building connections further afield. These connections did emerge, rather tentatively, but they must be sketched carefully, without exaggerating their importance and without so eroding an understanding of later, more decisive changes that globalization becomes a process virtually coterminous most of recorded world history. A case can be made that globalization was becoming inevitable by 1000 CE (though even here there are serious objections), but not before. Indeed, a key reason to sketch previous patterns is to provide a backdrop against which to measure later change, not to encourage a premature identification of globalization. Migrations and Trade Migrations were surely the earliest human encounter with long distances. Undoubtedly, most migrating groups initially moved just a few dozen miles away from their place of origin, and the long distances were achieved over time as a result of movement by many successive generations. There were, however, examples of apparently rapid moves over many hundreds of miles. It seems likely that some groups of Native Americans migrated swiftly down the Pacific coast, from the Siberia–Alaska land bridge and Northwest, by using coastal vessels, reaching various parts of South America surprisingly quickly, possibly within a few centuries. Even long-distance migrations, however, did not set up structures of exchange. They brought people to new places and sometimes mixed different groups of people, but the migrants did not usually return – so no durable patterns of regional interaction developed beyond encounters between residents and migrants on the spot. Many migrant regions soon returned to considerable isolation. The contrast with the later patterns of migration that would form part of globalization, to be discussed in subsequent chapters, is obvious.

Emerging Patterns of Contact, 1200 BCE–1000 CE  17 Unlike early migration, trade, over any appreciable distance, whether for gift exchange or for profit, did bring back and forth interactions. It is not entirely clear when trade emerged beyond purely local contacts. Sea shells from the Indian Ocean reached Syria by about 5000 BCE, probably constituting a gift exchange for ornamentation and obviously suggesting some movement across the Middle East from one coast to another – but we don’t know whether this was a regular interaction or even whether any group or individual made the entire trip or whether the shells passed gradually from one locality to the next. Trade over a hundred to two hundred miles also developed, for example in east-central Europe (in present-day terms, from Hungary to Poland), not only for precious stones but for materials, like flint, important in making early tools and weapons. The most venturesome early trade may have developed among peoples in Southeast Asia, for example in some of the islands of present-day Indonesia, where boats developed that were capable of navigating in sections of the Indian Ocean. Primitive shipping also developed in the Persian Gulf region, by at least 4000 BCE, with efforts to take advantage of favorable winds during certain months of the year to reach India and then return. Some of these Asian initiatives clearly reached the east coast of Africa, explaining the crop exchange between the two regions. Crucial developments in the emergence of overland trade (including transshipments of goods initially brought by sea, for example from Indian Ocean ports in the Persian Gulf inland to the rest of the Middle East), involved the domestication of pack animals. Donkeys were domesticated by the third millennium BCE, presumably near their African place of origin. They spread widely to other societies. Their capacity to carry relatively heavy loads over long distances, though slowly and sometimes reluctantly, was a crucial advance for landbased travel. For certain regions, both in Asia and in Africa, the domestication of the camel had similar significance. These were humble advances compared with the later technologies of globalization, but they greatly furthered connections among adjacent regions. Several of the early river valley civilizations developed interregional trade. As noted, Mesopotamia, at the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, exchanged with Harappan society in northeastern India (today Pakistan). Not only goods but also artistic symbols were part of this exchange, and there may have been crossfertilization in religious ideas as well. Egypt began to launch shipping in the Red Sea by 2500 BCE, reaching the Arabian Peninsula (present-day Yemen) and also farther down the Indian Ocean coast of Africa. Egyptians received gold, ivory, and slaves from Ethiopia in exchange for manufactured goods. Trade with the Middle East emphasized spices, some of which had been shipped over from India. Here was an example of somewhat longer-distance trade that did not however involve direct connections; that is, it operated in shorter interregional hops rather than direct contact. Several centers in the Persian Gulf, notably an island complex called Dilmun (present-day Bahrain), also served as transmission hubs for goods,

18 Context such as precious stones, produced elsewhere. By the second millennium BCE, a trading ship in the Mediterranean might carry goods from sub-­Saharan Africa and Northern Europe, as well as the Middle East or India, showing the range of contacts that sustained a lively commerce. Trade also began to show up as a literary subject. The first known epic poem, the Babylonian Gilgamesh from before 1200 BCE, involves a travel theme. A ruler travels from Sumer, which is largely treeless, hundreds of miles to the interior seeking timber for his palace (the timber would then be floated downriver), and of course encounters many adventures in the process. The early Hindu holy book, the Rig Veda of the second millennium BCE, features a story about pirates attacking an Indian merchant ship in the Persian Gulf, with Indian rulers sending armed vessels to retaliate against the pirates. Clearly, the excitement of contact caught attention early, and stories of this sort might stimulate other would-be adventurers. These early ventures had some obvious limitations. For the most part, they operated between two neighboring regions rather than over longer distances. (References however do exist to three-year expeditions, presumably all the way across the Indian Ocean and back.) Even the contacts between regional neighbors were also often interrupted. Migrations and invasions into the Middle East and India, for example, dried up seagoing initiatives around 2000 BCE for a considerable period of time – the newcomers, though triumphant over locals militarily, simply did not know how to run the more ambitious commercial operations. One particularly interesting initiative had a different fate: Southeast Asians, with their superior shipping technology, were able to sail into the Pacific, reaching and populating some of the island groups of Pacific Oceania. But the connections were not maintained, and a separate Polynesian culture began to develop without any further linkage with its Asian progenitor or with the many technological and agricultural advances that began to occur in Asia itself. A more routine barrier resulted from prescriptive competition: not surprisingly, some of the people involved in trade worked actively to discourage others from joining in. Arab merchants who brought spices like cinnamon to Egypt, in ships or overland caravans, tried to convince the Egyptians that they did not know where the spices came from, or that they were dropped in the mountains by giant fearsome birds and that they could be obtained only by doing battle with dragons. Ruses of this sort formed another limit on regular trading activities. Finally, since goods were often trans-shipped rather than carried directly from production to use, a great deal of confusion existed about the actual sources of goods. Many Mesopotamians believed that items came from Dilmun that were actually produced in India, and there were many other similar misidentifications – reflecting real limits on effective contact and knowledge even amid significant interregional commerce. Evaluations of merchants also suggest interesting hesitations about commercially based contacts. On the one hand, merchants were vital to the exchange

Emerging Patterns of Contact, 1200 BCE–1000 CE  19 process; on the other hand, many societies distrusted them because of their profit motives and because they seemed to differ from the high-prestige aristocrats and state officials. One result, for example in early Greece, was a heavy reliance on foreigners to carry on the dirty business of commerce. But foreign-ness might simply increase the stigma involved, and sometimes suggested real danger in too much reliance on contacts outside one’s own society. An Indian political handbook in the 4th century urged that trade should be promoted in order for rulers to earn tax revenues and acquire materials for war, but also starkly insisted: “Merchants … are all thieves, in effect, if not in name; they should be prevented from oppressing the people.” Ambivalences of this sort did not stop interregional exchange, but they suggested reactions that might constrain the whole process. Correspondingly, most cities in early civilizations were in fact centers for political and religious activities, with largely local trade and dependent on taxing peasants; only a few urban areas really focused on the longer-distance commercial opportunities. It is true that some of the unevenness and hesitation over interregional contacts still apply to globalization today: tension between local identity and selfsufficiency, on the one hand, and wider outreach on the other builds on issues that emerged quite early on. Concern about great and excess profit taken by long-distance business leaders has a contemporary echo as well. But limitations were far more marked in the early periods than today, and the impact of the contacts that did develop was measurably less great, in all but a few trading centers (Bahrain, for example), than would prove characteristic later. One result of the narrow base and oscillation in interregional outreach was the fact that some really promising projects had surprisingly little outcome. For example, the famous 5th-century (BCE) Greek traveler, Herodotus, reported that a Phoenician explorer deliberately went around the whole continent of Africa, with the sponsorship of an Egyptian pharaoh, to see if it was surrounded by water – the venture took 2 years. We cannot be sure if this actually occurred, but it would certainly have been feasible, and marks exactly the kind of initiative that one would expect of seafaring leaders like the Phoenicians – and exactly the kind of initiative that could have led to a permanent advance in Asian-African communications. But if it did occur there was no real result. No one else would venture around Africa until 1498 CE, which meant that African links with other parts of the world, though very important in the Indian Ocean and across the Sahara, long were somewhat limited. Similarly, Phoenician expeditions into the South Atlantic, reaching the Canaries and Azores island groups, had no aftermath, as these islands were subsequently isolated from any contact for another 2,500 years. In terms of relevant perspectives on globalization, it is vital to remember that contacts do not always pay off as against local preferences for greater isolation. On the other hand, the early patterns of interregional trading did begin to establish the kinds of motivations for at least medium-distance exchange that

20 Context would sustain more ambitious and consistent efforts later on. Various groups developed a real stake in access to goods that could not be produced locally. Spices are obviously a core example; they not only enlivened foods (in societies where variety and freshness of food constituted real challenges), but they also contributed to other vital activities – cinnamon, for example, was used in Egyptian preparations for embalming the dead. Various kinds of consumers and producers, in other words, sustained this kind of trade even if they might not always have been aware of the interregional contacts involved. Not only goods but also other novelties attracted attention. Urban crowds in Mesopotamia, for example, could enjoy elephants and apes brought in from Africa – one poem wrote of “beasts from distant lands jostling in the great square”; and the role of exotic animals in motivating interest in exchanges would be a sustaining factor from this point onward. Governments and merchants had stakes as well, and they were quite conscious of the external involvement. Merchants could obviously win profits from distance trade. By the third millennium, clusters of foreign merchants located in key cities, for example in the northern Middle East, obviously both reflecting and encouraging awareness of the importance of commerce beyond the single society. Some merchant associations developed to help regulate interregional trade, for example to handle issues like the exchange of payments but also to help assure ethical standards. Governments played a vital role as well, working to stimulate trade but also developing a clear interest in assuring and, where possible, expanding its reach. They acted not only because of their own interest in diversifying available goods, in some cases including materials vital in the production of weapons, but also because of the taxes they could levy on shipping and trade caravans. Egyptian rulers, for example, were quite aware of the advantages Egypt gained from its access to the Indian Ocean and were eager to make sure that no other society unduly interfered or competed. It has even been argued that the Greek conflict with Persia, a bit later on (492–479 BCE), was less a clash of civilizations or a quarrel over landed territory, but more a function of Greek reluctance to accept a Persian capacity to cut off Greek contact with the Indian Ocean and its commercial riches. Motives of this sort, and their variety, suggest how trade-based contacts in early agricultural societies both reflected and furthered the kinds of thinking that would feed later, more elaborate interregional connections, ultimately including globalization itself. The Classical Period The advent of the great classical civilizations, from 800 BCE or so onward, raises an obvious complication even in briefly summarizing the initial historical backdrop to globalization. The major civilizations now began to stretch over a large territory. In China during the Han dynasty, for example, it took 40 days to travel from the capital to the most far-flung provinces, even on the relatively good roads the state now provided. Not surprisingly, the bulk of the energies of

Emerging Patterns of Contact, 1200 BCE–1000 CE  21 various leaders – not just emperors but also venturesome merchants and cultural emissaries – went into developing internal networks that would take advantage of this new territory and work to integrate it into a (somewhat) coherent whole. Chinese leaders, for example, worked very hard to link north and south China, building canals to facilitate trade, sending colonists from the north to the south, and promoting use of a single language, Mandarin, at least in the governing class – despite or in fact because of the multiplicity of ethnic groups, languages, and cultures of the mixture of peoples that now made up the Chinese empire. All the classical empires fostered cultural systems – like Hinduism and Buddhism in India, or Greek-derived architecture around the Mediterranean – that would provide new links, not necessarily attacking more local systems but seeking to supplement them with more over-arching styles and values. Trading activities sought to take advantage of local specializations – like grain growing in North Africa, in exchange for wines and olive oil from Italy and Greece within Mediterranean civilization – to promote greater efficiency and prosperity (and tax revenues) and in the process create a more coherent overall economy. Common social systems spread out, like patterns of slavery in the Mediterranean or the caste system in India, another linking device. Finally, periodically at least, carefully constructed empires sought to provide political unity to all or at least major parts of the major civilization areas. These efforts were quite successful for many centuries, and in some cases, particularly India and China, they created durable values and institutions that would provide internal coherence and distinction from other major societies for many centuries, well past the classical period itself and into our own day. Not surprisingly, the efforts took a great deal of energy and focus, and could detract from comparable interest in reaching outside the new regional civilizations. Indeed, to the extent that integration efforts promoted core identities for many people they could actually discourage wider contact and breed disdain for societies and regions outside the home base. Greeks and Chinese both began to refer to peoples outside their own expanding orbits as “barbarians,” clearly inferior and worth little or no attention when there were so many exciting opportunities at home; the philosopher Aristotle in fact argued that it was “natural” for Greeks to enslave any non-Greeks. In sum, the great focus of the classical period in world history involved major regional integrations that unquestionably cut into previous levels of local isolation, even forging larger civilizational identities at least for the upper classes. Equally obviously, the result was not globalization – even the great Roman and Han Chinese empires were regional entities, not global ones. In some respects, in fact, the new structures might distract from a deep interest in wider contacts. At the same time, however, the classical civilizations did advance a somewhat larger interregional agenda in several ways, even though the agenda never gained top priority. In the first place, the new empires brought in territories that had not previously been regular parts of the patterns of exchange. The Roman

22 Context Empire, for example, building around the entire Mediterranean basin, now involved the whole of North Africa in regular contacts with southern Europe and the Middle East. Phoenician outreach had launched this inclusion, but the new Empire made it an established fact. North African regions periodically broke off from larger political units – for example, from the later Arab Caliphate – but they would from this point onward always be economically and culturally linked at least to the Middle East. Rome’s Empire similarly involved new parts of Europe, such as France, in extensive trade and cultural exchange. Each of the classical civilizations was regional, but the region was now writ large, so that internal contacts already constituted a significant reduction of local isolation. This is why the creation of the great classical empires sometimes gets mentioned as historical precedent for globalization. There was even some tourism within the empires, beyond adventurers out on their own. Some Romans began to travel to Greece and Egypt, and occasionally into the Middle East, to see famous sights. The idea of “Seven Wonders of the World,” like the Egyptian sphinx, originated in the classical period and helped spur travel for pleasure within the Mediterranean-Middle Eastern regions – another sign of the importance and widening reach of contacts within the huge territories that were now seen as part of a coherent whole. Furthermore, the empires created infrastructure that could facilitate even wider outreach, by making trade and travel easier than ever before. Particularly important here were developments in the Persian Empire and its later successors, given the geographic centrality of this region for potential contacts between Indian Ocean and Mediterranean networks. With conquests beginning in 556 BCE, the empire itself achieved great size at least for a century, stretching from the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent (the Indus river region) to Egypt and Libya and the Mediterranean, though efforts to move significantly into Europe, or further south in northeastern Africa, failed. Exchanges stretched even more broadly, as Persian rulers at their height received gifts from sub-­ Saharan Africa (including elephant tusks), India, and southern Arabia. The imperial government built an impressive system of highways, stretching over 8,000 miles. The great emperor Cyrus also established a series of carefullyspaced inns, to house merchants and travelers on their journeys, with water reservoirs, and he set up the world’s first postal and message service. A Greek later described the result: “With you [Persians], every way is easy, every river is crossable, and there is no dearth of provisions.” The main purpose of all of this, of course, was to facilitate communication and trade within the empire – including the movement of military forces; as with the other classical civilizations, knitting the new, vast territory together and keeping it together was a challenging task. But the same systems could help merchants and visitors from other regions, moving through the territory; more than ever before, the Middle East, including Persia, became an entrepot for exchanges between east and west, a central point in interactions between much of Asia and key parts of

Emerging Patterns of Contact, 1200 BCE–1000 CE  23 Europe and North Africa. While the Persian Empire itself had a relatively brief life span, its systems were preserved or revived by later rulers and regimes – including Alexander the Great, the revived Persian regime under the Parthians, and subsequent Arab caliphs. Similar developments took place within the Roman and Chinese empires. Chinese emperors began to build highways, at some points 50 feet wide, with trees planted alongside for aesthetic reasons. An official described the result as early as 178 BCE, noting that roads went “all over the empire … around lakes and rivers, and along the coasts of seas, so that all was made accessible.” By the time of the Han dynasty, 22,000 miles of highway were available in China, providing internal linkages but also facilitating travel to the west, toward central Asia. A postal system was also operative, with fresh horses for messengers every ten miles. Rome constructed even more roads – 48,000 miles worth – and also invested heavily in seaports along the Mediterranean, particularly for the shipment of grain. Finally, building on internal infrastructures for overland travel but also the seaports in both the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, classical civilizations extended contacts with each other, which is the achievement world historians have picked up on particularly in their legitimate eagerness to show the early origins of inter-societal contacts. The most famous linkage was the so-called Silk Road, which at its height brought products from western China to the upper classes of the Roman Empire – but also to elites in Persia and the Middle East and in India. Exchange of silk from China westward began as a result of growing contacts and tensions with nomadic peoples in western China/central Asia. Chinese officials and merchants brought silk cloth beyond the country’s borders as gifts to conciliate potential invaders but above all in exchange for horses, called “heavenly horses” because of their superior qualities, which had a huge impact on the Chinese military and on Chinese imagination more generally. Ultimately, the Chinese also imported alfalfa seeds, which allowed them a better agricultural base for sustaining the horses they were coming to depend on. But for world history, the main point was the movement of Chinese manufacturing output toward other regions, stimulating not only new forms of trade but new tastes which could sustain international commerce for centuries to come. Nomadic leaders used the Chinese-exported silks for their own adornment, and that of their families, but they simply could not consume all that the Chinese provided, so they began to pass the products west. Small amounts of silk reached the Middle East and even southeastern Europe by the 6th century BCE, but significant exchange developed only late in the 2nd century BCE, around the year 130. Nomadic traders began to take Chinese products, headed by silk, and move them through several overland routes through central Asia and then into Persia, where other merchants would pick up the loads and use the excellent road network to distribute the goods more widely – with some of them reaching the

24 Context Mediterranean where other merchants might buy them for sale to North Africa and southern Europe. Tastes for silk goods clearly expanded among upper-class men and women alike, with silk sashes adorning Roman togas or silk banners highlighting Persian military units. This was, in other words, a significant trade, from the 1st century BCE until the political and economic deterioration of Han China and the Roman Empire a few centuries later. Not only did silk move westward, but obviously exchange depended on some two-way traffic that would repay the merchants for their trouble and ultimately provide value for Chinese producers as well; from the Middle East and the Mediterranean came various precious stones, “the eggs of great birds” (probably ostriches), manufactured carpets, furs, and even entertainers, as well as the horses the Chinese cherished so greatly. Silk Road trade linked East Asia with other parts of the continent and with Europe for the first time, a major step beyond the more limited exchanges that had described interregional contacts previously. At the same time, however, the trade proceeded mainly through regional stages of a few hundred miles each with re-exchange at several points, in regional hubs like the city of Samarkand, rather than through direct long-distance exchange from producing to consuming regions. Merchants, correspondingly, focused on a fairly narrow geography, rather than directly connecting major civilization centers. In a larger sense, the Silk Road routes built on regional systems that had long connected the northwest part of the Indian subcontinent (today’s Afghanistan and Pakistan) to Persia and the Middle East, or China to central Asia. It was also true that (central Asian horses aside) the exchange goods that came into China were not as sought after, not as capable of developing new consumer tastes, as silk was in Persia and the Roman Empire; they tended to be seen as novelty items rather than staple luxuries. Indeed, the Romans, who wrote widely about the importance of silk, were not very clear at all about what they exported in return. This imbalance between China and other parts of the world would long complicate long-distance trade, and it certainly constrained activity during the classical period itself. Another set of routes served, like the Silk Road, to link different parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe over long distances, with new merchant activity and new consumer tastes integral to the process. In this case, however, the sea – the Indian Ocean – rather than land served as vehicle, and India, rather than China, was the key player. Southeast Asia – what is now Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia – was heavily involved in this network as well, providing products and merchants alike. The quality of ships gradually improved by the first millennium BCE, though boats made from leather, papyrus, and other materials continued to operate in parts of the Indian Ocean. Navigators from Sri Lanka apparently learned how to use birds, taking them on voyages and releasing the creatures so that they could follow them to land. The Chinese invention of the rudder would ultimately facilitate sea trade in a more systematic fashion. Sailors learned how to use

Emerging Patterns of Contact, 1200 BCE–1000 CE  25 monsoon winds to help move through various parts of the Indian Ocean in appropriate seasons. A host of people were involved in trade: Arabs, Egyptians, Greeks, Malays, as well as Indians and Chinese. Spices constituted the core of the Indian Ocean trade. Chinese merchants sought cloves and similar items from Southeast Asia and India, moving both overland and from the Pacific coast into Indian waters. Pepper, produced in India proper, became a crucial product. Greeks used it, partly for medicinal purposes, and it became a vital cooking item during the Roman Empire. Spices, incense, pearls, and other materials from East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula blended into this trade as well, including African items like rhinoceros’ horn. Manufactured products gained attention. Indian cotton cloth won popularity, though the Roman Empire ultimately banned it because of its competition with woolen and linen fabrics. India also became another transit point for silks imported overland from China. The Chinese also had contacts with India by sea, at one point sending an expedition to buy a rhinoceros for the emperor’s private zoo. From the Mediterranean world, both merchants and government officials worked actively to promote these valuable exchanges, particularly by the time of the Roman Empire. Regular fleets set sail from the Red Sea coast of Egypt – upward of 120 boats, complete with Roman archers to help repel pirates; and small clusters of Roman merchants formed in several Indian cities. Roman ships (staffed mainly by Greeks and Middle Easterners) also traded regularly with Sri Lanka and the Middle East, again from the Egyptian coast. From the Red Sea, goods were offloaded onto camels, which would carry them to the Nile and thence to the port of Alexandria, where they could enter standard Mediterranean trade. Romans, for their part, were able to put more items into this network than was true for the Silk Road, because ships could carry heavier goods. Thus, Roman tin was sent to India, along with linen cloth made in Egypt and other products. Wine was particularly important, probably the most valued Mediterranean item in play. But even with this, Romans faced a constant balance of payments challenge, because the commodities they wanted from Asia exceeded Asian interest in what they had to offer. Gold shipments were essential to correct the imbalance, and Roman observers worried that too much of their wealth was being siphoned off as a result. Exchanges within Southeast Asia also linked into the Indian Ocean network, often brokered by merchants from Malaysia or Indonesia. Interregional trade was not new in this area, but the growing links with Indian and Chinese systems gave it greater resonance. Raw materials were involved, including a number of fine woods native to the region and esteemed for their decorative qualities. But manufactured items were important as well, and some were now deliberately adapted to fit into long-distance commerce. Producers in Indonesia and Cambodia, for example, developed lower-cost incense candles or skin treatments to compete with goods from the Middle East and the Mediterranean, particularly in Chinese markets. India exported to Vietnam cotton cloth, pepper, but

26 Context also glass products and gold coins made in the Roman Empire; the Chinese sent maritime expeditions down the Vietnamese coast looking for a route to India. The Chinese also had active interest in unusual animals, such as elephants, from the region. And again, regional products, including spices such as nutmeg, exchanged with Indian or Persian merchants, could make it all the way back to Mediterranean consumers. Consequences and Limitations All of this has strong overtones of characteristics seen in economic globalization, though of course only parts of three continents, not all six inhabited continents, were involved. Consumers, though primarily wealthy ones, unquestionably developed tastes for goods that could only be brought in from a long distance. Clear trade routes were established, overland between East Asia and southern Europe, and by sea from China’s Pacific Coast to the Middle East and East Africa (and by overland extension, the Mediterranean), that would often be used later on – the Silk Road, for example, crops up again in the Mongol period, and Indian Ocean connections remain vital to the present day. Merchants and key rulers alike knew that interregional commerce could pay off in profits, tribute, and taxes, and their experience and motivations could easily carry forward into later periods. Small wonder that some historians, writing of the unexpected richness and variety of interregional trade by the early centuries CE, claim a virtually uninterrupted progress from these patterns to the kinds of trade that would branch out in the 15th century, to even more recent connections – in essence, arguing for the origins of globalization in developments that date back to more than 2,000 years ago. There is no question that, centered of course in trade, some key habits and specific connections and processes were established by the time of the classical empires that would build into the global world we know today. It is also important to note that expanding trade brought new potential for the spread of epidemic disease. Diseases like bubonic plague, probably spreading from India, seriously cut into Chinese and Mediterranean populations by the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, contributing to civilizational crisis. Here is another suggestion of features that would ultimately become part of globalization. Setting a preliminary foundation, however, is not the same thing as launching the process itself. A number of limitations described even the most ambitious interregional enterprises, and these limitations strongly suggest that a globalization claim is premature. In the first place, though this point is hard to establish with any precision, the range and excitement of the far-flung merchants should not distract from the fact that the bulk of social energies and imagination, even in the merchant class, continued to go into local and regional activities. Far more people were involved in building networks within the great empires than ventured into connections among major societies. And the key achievement of the classical period was the construction of new regional civilizations, above more

Emerging Patterns of Contact, 1200 BCE–1000 CE  27 purely local attachments – not the narrower bridges among these civilizations themselves. The links that did develop, furthermore, centered for the most part on interesting, certainly valued, but fairly superficial luxury products. Heavy materials, goods used by large numbers of people for basic activities, moved within regions or occasionally from one region to a neighbor – like the timber brought several hundred miles from the interior to the Mesopotamian coast – but not commonly in interregional trade. Expensive cloth – not the stuff of most people’s clothing or daily wear – spices, and a few other decorative items clearly helped develop new tastes but hardly worked into the essentials of life. A few substances did become part of wider rituals or consumer interests – like the spices used in Egyptian embalming, or the Roman tin imported in India – but they were the exception, not the rule. Trade was, of course, the centerpiece of the interconnections, and while arguably this remains true with globalization, the narrowness of the trade impact in the earlier period was noteworthy. Technological exchange, for example, did not follow as clearly from commercial contact as might be expected. Chinese advances during the classical period, like the invention of paper, simply did not yet spill over to other societies, despite the expansion of access to Chinese products and commerce. Apparently, connections were not yet regular enough for people outside China to gain a sense of the obvious advantages of paper as a writing material. The same kind of limitation applies to cultures and cultural apparatus. Extensive trade with India did not lead any other society, at this point, to realize the superiority of the Indian numbering system; separate numbering procedures, like the cumbersome numerals of the Roman Empire, continued to prevail. Religions and philosophical systems remained localized for the most part, spreading within the new civilizations but not much beyond them. Artistic influences were similarly limited, aside from some specific imitation of a few designs. Artists in northwestern India copied Greek styles for a brief period after Alexander the Great’s conquests brought Greek rule to the region – the results were pictures of the Buddha dressed in Greek hair arrangements and costumes, for a little over a century – but there was no durable result, no real combining of styles. A few exceptions can of course be noted – Middle Easterners picked up some Indian stories that later became part of popular literature, and the game that ultimately turned into chess spread from India to the Middle East – but for the most part the range of interactions that we associate with globalization simply had yet to develop. Interregional knowledge was also limited, even where products moved over great distances. The absence of direct travel, as opposed to shorter caravans followed by trans-shipment to another merchant group, played a key role here, along with the massive amount of time even a trip of a few hundred miles required. Chinese adventurers and emissaries went into central Asia and later Chinese merchants and Buddhist students traveled to India; a limited number

28 Context of Greeks and Romans moved through the Middle East and into parts of central Asia, and also into a few sections of sub-Saharan Africa; and of course Roman trade with India brought direct exchange. Persians and Arabs, who might venture both east and west, may have known a bit about Europe and India alike, though the evidence is limited. But Mediterranean knowledge of China, and vice versa, was exceedingly vague, because, as far as we can definitely know, no Chinese ever ventured that far west, and at most one Roman group ever made it to China (and we cannot be sure even of this). Roman aristocrats might love silk, but they had little notion where it came from; their known world stopped at India, and only a single Greek writer, who had traveled to India, makes even a passing reference to “Thina” as a source of silk, adding “It is not easy to get to this Thina: for rarely do people come from it …. ” Romans indeed believed that silk came from plants or trees save for one writer who claimed it was produced by giant spiders. Chinese authors knew a bit more about Rome than vice versa, describing it as a well-governed land with rich but honest merchants, but claiming also that Rome was the source of products like an ointment that made gold. Wild beliefs about regions that were vaguely known about but not directly visited – including claims about cannibalism or bizarre sexual habits – showed the extent of ignorance about even some neighboring regions, like central Asia or parts of Africa; and the same beliefs could discourage actual contact. Globalization, in contrast, while it still involves mutual prejudices, has greatly reduced the amount of fanciful exaggeration. Finally, even the amount of interregional trade that did develop spurred critics and skeptics – though arguably this has some echoes in diverse reactions to globalization today. If products were demonstrably moving farther than people did, this very fact created anxiety about the products as well. Roman moralists wrote scathingly against the vanity and wastefulness embodied in imported silks. Thus, Seneca, in the 1st century CE: I see there raiments of silk – if that can be called raiment, which provides nothing that could possibly afford protection for the body, or indeed modesty, so that, when a woman wears it, she can scarcely … swear that she is not naked. Other writers referred to silk as degenerate or indecent, in violation of all traditional standards for dress. And while Chinese authorities did not get quite so exercised about foreign products – partly because there was nothing as overwhelmingly sought after as silk – they might note how little they valued distant opportunities. Thus, the one Roman merchant mission that may have reached China, in 166 CE (it is at least mentioned in Chinese chronicles, though there is no direct Roman evidence), brought gifts that did not impress the emperor, who refused to do any business with the emissaries. As a number of historians have noted, greater official interest at this point might have created not only a more

Emerging Patterns of Contact, 1200 BCE–1000 CE  29 direct but a more durable bond between East Asia and the Mediterranean, but it was a testimony to mutual ignorance and the relatively slight importance of most actual long-distance trade that nobody cared to follow up. The two regions would remain without direct contact for another 1,200 years. Not surprisingly, in this situation, the collapse of the great classical empires, beginning with the fall of the Han dynasty in China in 220 CE, severely threatened the interregional linkages that did exist. Overland travel became far more dangerous because there were no strong states to protect against marauders, and this came close to shutting the Silk Road down in favor of shorter-distance exchanges. Merchants from Rome and China withdrew from the Indian Ocean, and while Indian traders took advantage of the opportunity to extend their efforts to Southeast Asia, the range and volume of trade in this region also declined for a time. Commerce would revive, of course, and the Indian Ocean continued to attract attention, but there was no question that something of a crisis had emerged by the 3rd or 4th century CE that significantly affected interregional contacts for several centuries. The Missionary Religions In this crisis, finally, one other development began to take shape, with ambivalent implications for interregional contacts. As the classical empires deteriorated and then disappeared, with the disorderly collapse not only of the Han dynasty in China but later the Roman Empire in the west, several major religions began to spread more widely, their organization and otherworldly goals serving societies now in earthly disarray. Buddhism had already begun to move beyond India, and now reached actively into Southeast Asia and into China (and ultimately other parts of East Asia); Chinese interest was clearly in part a reaction to the deteriorating conditions after the fall of the Han. Christianity spread widely within the Roman Empire, particularly from the 4th century onward, and then burst beyond, moving particularly toward northern Europe but also toward additional pockets in Africa and the Middle East. Soon, after 600 CE, a new religion, Islam, would spread most rapidly of all. All of these religions traveled on the strength of missionary zeal, a growing commitment to spread what was regarded as religious truth beyond the boundaries of any one society or people. The resultant processes of conversion and religious remapping served as one of the key developments in the next, postclassical period of world history. The spread of world religions, in turn, had several links to the larger process of interregional contacts, some of which persist to this day. In the first place, as the religions began to compete with more localized, polytheistic faiths, they reflected the wider contacts already developing among parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe. Ethiopia, for example, was open to Christianity because of earlier trade links to the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean. Merchant activity often went hand in glove with religious proselytism and missionary work, as merchants

30 Context helped bring religious practices as they set up trading communities, and as their commercial success might suggest the superiority of their religion over more traditional local faiths and provide an additional motive for conversion. Indeed, it can be argued that the unprecedented commitment to the idea of a universal religion, valid for all people, was a revolutionary development whose novelty reflected the experience of significant contact – creating a notion of a common humanity arguably for the first time in human history. Early defenders of the major world religions all debated this point – whether Buddhism as a reform movement directed at Hinduism should just be discussed in India, whether Christianity was only for Jews, whether Islam should be for Arabs alone. Leaders of the three faiths all ultimately decided, often after a period of hesitation, that the response should be ecumenical, that unlike all earlier belief systems the faiths should not apply to a single people or region alone but potentially to humanity as a whole. And this in turn suggested an awareness spurred by a sense of contacts among different regions and societies. The missionary religions were not yet truly global – each had its own main regions – but they were the closest thing yet to a global cultural force – obviously worth comparison to the newer global cultural forces that receive so much emphasis today. The same universal claims also generated further activity. The second point about the new religions is the fact that they could encourage additional contacts in turn. Belief in a single God or divine order, rather than divinities more specifically attached to a particular place, and the availability of doctrines and rituals that were also not place-specific, could provide new assurance to individuals moving out of their locality of origin, for whatever reason. The same faith that worked at home would be equally valid thousands of miles away. Expanding religions also provided new motives for travel, beyond the previous predominance of trade. Missionaries could be as eager as merchants to reach a distant spot. Religious faithful might seek study opportunities near spiritual centers like monasteries in India (for Buddhists) or hubs of religious scholarship like Cairo or Baghdad in Islam. Larger numbers of religious individuals might simply want to travel to holy sites, however distant – like Jerusalem for Christians, or even more urgently like Mecca for Muslims. The emerging religious map also, however, set up some new divisions, among regions with different religious preferences – this was the final implication for patterns of contact. The world religions overcame narrower cultural and political boundaries, but their variety, and in some cases mutual hostility, very definitely challenged any idea of a single world. Wider contacts might be impeded by religious fears or dislikes, to a greater extent than had been true before, as new kinds of intolerance emerged. Individual travelers might hesitate before going beyond their religious community, or feel uneasy if they tried. The Mediterranean now divided between Christian and Muslim, and while the result was not always belligerent intolerance, the religious rift set up cultural barriers that have not been entirely overcome even in the present day. Certainly,

Emerging Patterns of Contact, 1200 BCE–1000 CE  31 when religious allegiances were at their height, the separate systems of beliefs and practices seriously complicated larger patterns of exchange. Here is a final reason to see the premodern centuries of the human experience, at least until 1000 CE or so, as contributing to, but measurably separate from, processes that might be considered actual versions of globalization. *** Overall, it remains true that most developments in the world history by the end of the classical period and even slightly beyond were regional rather than transregional, emphasizing separate patterns more than contacts. Energies went into discrete regional identities and internal connections more than into crosscutting initiatives. The spread of religions modified this pattern in some important ways, allowing some sense of a common humanity. But while the religions leaped over some regional boundaries – this was particularly true for Islam’s spread into several parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as Spain – they also created some new barriers. Even within Christianity, the differences that developed between Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy could constrain interaction, and the same would hold true to some extent for separate strands in Islam. Contacts and shared processes – the features we properly associate with globalization – had yet to gain the ascendant. We can look back and see innovations like the Silk Roads (invoked today by China in its new effort at global leadership) as a building block for later connections, but further change was essential before the first identifiable form of globalization could emerge. Further Readings On debates over the effective origins of world trade and globalization, see Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gillis, eds., The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand (London, 1993) and Oystein LaBianca and Sandra Shum, eds., Connectivity in Antiquity: Globalization as Long-Term Historical Process (New York, 2004); Karl Moore and David Lewis, Birth of the Multinational: 2000 Years of Ancient Business History – From Ashur to Augustus (Copenhagen, 1999). For overviews, see Richard L. Smith, Premodern Trade in World History (New York, 2008); Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Premodern Times (New York, 1993); Stephen Gosch and Peter N. Stearns, Premodern Travel in World History (New York, 2008); Milo Kearney, The Indian Ocean in World History (New York, 2004). On early trade patterns, see Maria Eugenia Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies and Trade, trans. Mary Turton (2nd ed., Cambridge, 2001); Lionel Casson, Ships and Seafaring in Ancient Times (Austin, TX, 1994); Karl Hutterer, Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia: Perspectives from Prehistory, History and Ethnography

32 Context (Ann Arbor, MI, 1977); Samuel Mark, From Egypt to Mesopotamia: A Study of Predynastic Trade Routes (College Station, TX, 1997); Shereen Ratnagar, Encounters: The Westerly Trade of the Harappa Civilization (New Delhi, 1981). On trade during the classical period, see Raoul McLoughlin, Rome and the Distant East: Trade Routes with the Ancient Lands of Arabia, India and China (London, 2010); Vimala Begley and Richard D. De Puma, eds., Rome and India: The Ancient Sea Trade (Madison, WI, 1991); Linda Ellis and Frank L. Kidner, eds., Travel, Communication and Geography in Late Antiquity (Burlington, VT, 1994); Xinru Liu, Ancient China and Ancient India: Trade and Cultural Exchanges (New Delhi, 1988); J.I. Miller, The Spice Trade of the Roman Empire (Oxford, 1998); Yu Yingshi, Trade and Expansion in Han China: A Study in the Structure of Sino-barbarian Relations (Berkeley, CA, 1967). See also Frank L. Holt, Alexander the Great and Bactria: The Formation of a Greek Frontier in Central Asia (Leiden, 1989). On migration patterns, see Peter Blackwood, ed., The Global Prehistory of Human Migration (New York, 2015) and Patrick Manning, Migration in World History (3rd ed., New York, 2020); on epidemic disease, see Samuel Cohn Jr., Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS (Oxford, 2018). On the missionary religions, see Roy Amore, Amir Hussain and Willard Oxroby, eds., A Concise Introduction to the World Religions (4th ed., New York, 2016). On the Silk Road, see Peter Frankopan, The Silk Road: A New History of the World (New York, 2016); Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2015); Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road (Berkeley, CA, 1999); and Frances Wood, The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia (Berkeley, CA, 2004). See also Christopher Beckworth, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton, NJ, 2009).

Part II

Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE By 1000 CE, the nature of interregional contacts linking many parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe was being substantially transformed. Exchanges among regions accelerated – not to modern levels, to be sure, but well beyond what had occurred previously. Trade was the key connection, as the variety and importance of goods transported over considerable distances increased. But a new range of technological and cultural exchanges occurred as well. For an interesting handful of individuals, from several different societies, even international travel proved to be a growing attraction, and the several travelers who wrote about their experiences might inspire others. The new patterns built in part on prior developments, though the number of regions involved went well beyond any precedent. The Silk Roads were still in play, though other routes often overshadowed their importance, particularly given the growing vitality of Indian Ocean shipping. Some of the key export goods, like silk and spices, were familiar as well. The role of the missionary religions, in motivating travel and inspiring a wider vision of humanity, was a crucial component. But the ramifications of the new framework went well beyond previous levels, bolstered as well by some important new technologies and commercial methods. Historians and other social scientists have identified the innovations of this interregional framework in several ways. David Northrup offers a striking claim: before about 1000 CE, major regions operated largely separately, with mutual contacts barely affecting their substantial divergence. After 1000, however, increasing convergence became the norm, with regional societies functioning in response to contacts, communications, and even deliberate imitations. Further, the importance of linkages would simply expand over time, despite periodic setbacks, meaning that the interconnected societies of today are direct heirs of the various forces that created a more convergent world a bit more than a millennium ago. Building on essentially the same point, other historians, like A.G. Hopkins, have simply labeled the patterns that were emerging about 1000 CE “archaic globalization” – globalization because of the new and durable linkages involved, archaic because the specifics were very different from the globalization that would unfold later on. DOI: 10.4324/9781003439615-4

34  Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE Chapters in this section focus on the nature of this first globalization framework, taking shape around 1000 (Chapter 3) but then adjusting and expanding further with subsequent developments like the impact of the great Mongol Empire that arose in the 13th century and a fleeting Chinese effort to create yet another set of options (Chapter 4). At the same time, however, the chapters also clarify the “archaic” point – the many ways that this framework differed from what would come later, beginning with the vital fact that it was not yet fully global, given the key regions that were still untouched. Not surprisingly, data about patterns of exchange improve considerably for this new period, compared to what went before. Among other things, travelers’ account become not only more numerous but more accurate, less filled with bizarre exaggerations. Challenges remain, however. In some cases – like the presence of Arab merchants in Scandinavia, or the activities of the Chinese on the East African coast, we have only discoveries of old coins for evidence. There are no qualitative data to give a fuller sense of the experience, or of local reactions. Were there other contacts that left no records at all? It is tantalizing to wonder if Chinese voyagers reached the southern tip of Africa as part of their 15th-century voyages, and at least peeked at the Atlantic – but we do not know if they went that far. Evidence gaps have generated some vigorous (and sometimes fanciful) debates – such as the idea that one Chinese expedition actually crossed the Pacific, or that other routes across the Pacific reached the Americas before the 15th century. Certainly, more information may come to light in the future, for this crucial transitional period. Exploration of early globalization establishes one other vital preliminary, this one quite clear though possibly unexpected. The initial authors of a more vigorous interregional framework were not Europeans; Arabs played a key role, joined by people from South and Southeast Asia. Western Europeans would enter in as well, but as slight latecomers and with some initial disadvantages compared to other regions involved. This disparity would play its own role in the changes in globalization that would occur later on. Further Readings David Northrup, “Globalization and the Great Convergence: Rethinking World History in the Long Term,” Journal of World History 16 (2005); Ino Rossi, Frontiers of Globalization Research (Berlin, 2008); Lula Martell, Sociology of Globalization (London, 2010); C.A. Bagly, Birth of the Modern World (London, 2004); Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250 to A.D. 1350 (Oxford, 1989); A.G. Hopkins, Globalization in History (London, 2002). For debates over whether Polynesians reached the Americas as part of their impressive voyages in the Pacific, see David Lewis, We the Navigators. Landfinding in the Pacific (Honolulu, 1994). For an absolutely false claim about a Chinese voyage to the Americas, masquerading as revisionist history while simply manufacturing evidence, see Gavin Menzies, 1421. The Year China Discovered America (New York, 2003).

3

The Birth of Globalization?

The watershed in interregional contacts that has been identified around 1,000 years ago was not based on a single striking event or discovery. The date, 1000 CE, is simply a convenient marker – nothing really dramatic relevant to globalization occurred in that year, and few people at the time would have been aware of any particularly significant alteration or upsurge in global relations. But by 1000 CE, a number of key changes had been accumulating over the course of about 300 years; and after that date the changes would solidify and amplify, justifying the understanding, in retrospect, that a fundamental transition was underway. In contrast to prior patterns, including even the earlier Silk Roads, a network had emerged that was unprecedentedly wide ranging, with regular contacts and a variety of impacts – a network that can, for the first time, be called an early version of globalization. No one, to be sure, puts an unqualified globalization label on the changes that took shape during the centuries after the end of the great classical empires, which is why adjectives like “archaic” are carefully attached. Among other things, the networks that developed were Afro-Eurasian, not truly global – for the Americas and Pacific Oceania remained isolated from the larger interregional currents. But the identification of a process that involved such intense and fruitful contacts that its further development became highly probable – so that the extension to the whole world, while itself a significant further change, built on established patterns – may certainly justify the conclusion that the effective origins of globalization really date this far back in historical chronology. After all, the voyages that would bring the Americas into the global picture for the first time were intended not to discover new lands but to shorten the connections between Europe and Asia – intended, in other words, to take advantage of existing interregional ties. The idea of the 1000s as the beginnings of global linkage, in strong contrast to previous and more sporadic connections, is not an abstract claim. The challenge is to demonstrate not only change, but significant change, and to show what this all meant in human terms. For not only is there no dramatic event to mark the divide between separateness and convergence; there is also no overwhelming DOI: 10.4324/9781003439615-5

36  Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE new technology, no communications revolution of the sort we associate with more modern phases of globalization. The shift, instead, resulted from an accumulation of developments in shipping, in trade routes, and in cultural outreach (plus a bit of technology) – and accumulation, though the basis for most major departures in history, is never as vivid as a single transformative invention or some upheaval in foreign policy or war. Happily, nevertheless, the chronological divide is not just a theoretical construct or even an organizing device for textbooks (though that’s true too, as historians increasingly realize the ramifications of the change), for it has a concrete human face. It was only in the centuries after 1000 CE, for example, that wide-ranging interregional travel took shape. Whereas during the classical period there is record, and an uncertain one at that, of only one trip between Europe and China, by the 13th and 14th centuries a substantial number of travelers went from Europe or North Africa to East Asia. Some were missionaries, some merchants, some adventurers or job-seekers, and there were even some entertainers involved. The world’s greatest known traveler, the lawyer Ibn Battuta, operated in this context, with many trips from his native Morocco to the Middle East, central Asia, India, China and Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, logging almost 80,000 miles on his journeys overall. Travel of this sort reflected a new capacity to take advantage of established routes and contacts and a new interest in reaching out as widely as possible in the known world. It also supported further travel in turn, for some of the new adventurers, including Ibn Battuta, wrote accounts of their trips which helped a wider audience learn about other parts of the world and could spur some to outreach of their own. It was no accident that Christopher Columbus, on his own travels late in the 15th century, had with him a copy of the most famous European travel book to that point, Marco Polo’s description of his journey to China. Long-distance travel was still the province of a relatively small number of individuals, and of course it was noteworthy that the more extensive ventures went west to east rather than vice versa; but the phenomenon was no longer simply a rarity, and that fact in turn signaled the beginning of a new era in terms of interregional contacts. Mapping came of age by around 1000 CE, with increasingly accurate representations of Asia, Europe, and much of Africa. Arab mapmakers led the way, which reflected larger Arab leadership in the processes of trade and travel. But mapmakers from other societies joined in, based on knowledge of Arab maps and guides and on travel from their own home bases. Fanciful representations even of neighboring regions, common still in the classical period, gave way to more precise detail. Better maps, in turn, facilitated additional contacts, showing the attainability of far-flung destinations. Dependence on long-distance trade also increased, another sign of change. Markets for Chinese silk continued to play an important role, which represented obvious continuity with the past. But the range of Chinese exports expanded,

The Birth of Globalization?  37 for example to include porcelain. Chinese consumers began to count on imports of tea and some other food specialties from Southeast Asia. Imports of African slaves to the Middle East became a regular trade item (and ultimately, over several centuries, more than 9 million people would be brought in from eastern Africa). Indian cotton cloth became a valued commodity in markets as distant as Japan, gaining attention from European merchants as well by the 13th and 14th centuries. By the 14th century, European interest in imported sugar (which could not be locally grown) began to surface, and would ultimately help spur increased European involvement in global outreach more generally; but even before this point Arabs had extended interregional trade in sugar, once they encountered the product in India. Some of the items that were becoming central to interregional trade also began to move below purely elite consumer levels to involve somewhat larger segments of the population; this was particularly true for the spices used in medicine. Correspondingly, some regions – for example, parts of China during the Song dynasty (960–1279) – began to depend heavily on production for the export trade. The impact of the interregional economy, with increasingly active exchanges among Asia, Africa, and Europe, began to accelerate, moving beyond the levels of some surplus production and the interests of a few merchant groups. Recent discoveries of ships from the period, which sank for various reasons, add specifics to the point about the growing range of trade and consumer involvement. The Belitung shipwreck, involving an Indian or more probably Arab ship, was found in Indonesian waters in 1998. It had been built according to Arab design, with Middle Eastern wood, though it had been repaired with materials from other areas. Its cargo consisted of some lead, a variety of Chinese ceramics from the Tang dynasty – mostly bowls, but also small jars, a few large basins, and some very artistic porcelains. Chinese coins were also carried. Star anise, another Chinese product, took some space, though there were no other spices. From the Middle East, possibly intended as gifts, were silver items, mirrors, and other glasswares, along with dice and some cast iron utensils. The ship is clear evidence of the direct trade between the Middle East and China by the 9th century; the ship had undoubtedly loaded in China and was bound for the Persian Gulf. The Cirebon shipwreck, another fairly recent discovery, involved a Southeast Asian boat, also sunk off the coast of Indonesia. Here too, the ship had taken on goods at Quanzhou or another southern Chinese harbor and was headed for the western Indian Ocean with intermediate stops at Southeast Asian ports. The ship contained over 200,000 artifacts, including objects for Buddhist and Hindu temples. Chinese ceramics were again strongly represented, with bowls, platters, pitchers but also figurines and incense burners. Colored glassware included many items inscribed in Arabic. Various jewels and ornate daggers, mirrors, and bells highlight ritual objects. Items belonging to crew members suggest a multifaith, multi-ethnic crew of Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims.

38  Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE Several crucial developments converged in the centuries before 1000 CE, providing the context for the new levels of trade and travel. Islam rose and spread rapidly; in the Middle East and North Africa, a new Arab caliphate provided additional political structure. The spread of Christianity and Buddhism continued as well, particularly in some new geographic centers, like Japan and northern Europe, helping to connect them to more established civilizations. The Chinese Empire revived and began to exercise wider regional influence. The creation of a new network for interactions among different regions depended on the confluence of many of these specific changes, along with the growth of trade itself. Arab and other Islamic merchants and missionaries gained a new leadership role, extending an east–west axis from China and its neighbors to Europe and North Africa. Additionally, the emergence of a number of additional exchange routes depended on improved social organization in places like Japan, West Africa, and Russia; many of these new routes ran south to north and greatly expanded the geography of participation in active contacts. Capping all this, the crafting of new technologies, particularly for sea travel, both reflected and further supported the extension of trade. Arabs as Trans-Regional Leaders By the 7th and 8th centuries, Arabs played an increasingly dominant role in Indian Ocean trade, using many routes and exchanging many products that had been in play before, but with increased intensity and range. They neither sought nor gained monopoly: Indians were still active, as were other peoples from the Middle East including Persians; traders from Southeast Asia maintained participation as well. But the Arab role was noteworthy, and this helped extend Indian Ocean activity particularly down the east coast of Africa, all the way to present-day Mozambique. Arab trading settlements were established at ports and on islands down the coast, and merchants mixed with local elites to form a network of connections. A new language, Swahili (from the Arab word for “shores”), mixing Arabic and African (Bantu) tongues with some Persian words as well, emerged for this trading and governing community, a clear sign how culture changed to accommodate more consistent commercial exchange. And Islam, the religion of a growing majority of Arabs, provided religious linkage as well. In addition to the enhanced African connection, Arabs and other Islamic traders brought several new components even to established Indian Ocean routes. Arab conquests through the Middle East and North Africa, and into Spain and central Asia, provided a large, landed territorial base that helped link Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trade and provided a number of vantage points for ventures into the Indian Ocean itself. At various junctures between 600 and 1100 CE, Red Sea expeditions, from the Arabian Peninsula or Egypt, provided a primary entry for Arab activities not only to Africa but to India, Southeast Asia,

The Birth of Globalization?  39 and beyond. Trading ventures also emanated from traditional ports in Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf. The high Arab and Islamic valuation of commerce and merchant endeavor provided a vital component for this new surge of interregional trade, along with the spur of competition with Persian and other traders. Muhammed himself was a former merchant and noted the value and satisfaction of merchant life, second only to a religious vocation. While later Islamic authorities sometimes questioned commercial motives, concerned about the honesty of activities designed to make money, Islam overall was far friendlier to the merchant calling than any of the other world religions, or than Confucianism in China. The Quran explicitly equated honest merchants with prophets and martyrs. Trading and profit-taking were perfectly compatible with religious purity so long as certain ethical standards were observed, including refraining from directly charging interest on loans, and so long as religious obligations such as regular prayer and charity were fulfilled. Indeed, merchant wealth so obviously contributed to the capacity for charitable activity, and also the ability to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca, that it might be seen as a religious plus. And of course, in fact, expansion of trade directly encouraged Islamic missionary activity. The contrast with Buddhist concerns about the snares of worldly achievements, or Christian worry that too much interest in money-making might distract from spiritual goals, was considerable. Of course, Buddhists and Christians could be successful merchants too, and by the 14th century Christian attacks on business were lessening, but the Islamic cultural impulse, the sense that trading success and religious devotion could go hand in hand, helped push Arab merchants to unusual heights. Islam, and Arabic, provided other trading assets as well. A reinforcing pattern emerged in which expanding trade helped encourage conversion to Islam, not only along the African coast but in parts of India and Southeast Asia, which in turn made it easier for Arabs to deal with local merchants as co-religionists. Ultimately, this shared religious factor would encourage Indian Muslims, Indonesians, and others to become more active in interregional trade in their own right, but initially, obviously, the impulse came from the Middle East. The same cultural umbrella made Arabic something of a common language throughout much of the Indian Ocean, which in turn helps explain how an increasing rate of contact could operate given the many languages which flourished in the regions involved. Enough people knew smatterings of Arabic, and enough translators emerged who could use Arabic to interact with other language groups (including Swahili), to facilitate regular exchanges well beyond the level that had operated previously. Not surprisingly, at the end of the 15th century when the Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama rounded the southern tip of Africa and set sail for India, one of his key moves was to find an Arab-speaking Muslim interpreter who knew sufficient Portuguese to backstop interactions with Indian merchants.

40  Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE Travel and trade in turn served as important elements of Arab culture as it evolved in the centuries about 1000 CE. A number of books discussed trade routes and served as travel guides, and there were also Persian materials that discussed travel for example in China. The famous stories of A Thousand and One Nights, written during the Abbasid caliphate, used the character of Sinbad the Sailor to take readers through the Indian Ocean, encountering bizarre birds (ostriches) in Africa along with purchases of ivory elephant tusks, visiting ruby markets in Sri Lanka, and meeting menacing tribesmen in Indonesia. Later stories, like the Tales of Abu Zayd, similarly used Indian Ocean trade routes as the setting for various adventures. Offerings of this sort reflected the importance of Arab involvement in wide exchanges, and might stimulate interest in these exchanges in turn. Scholars like Amira Bennison have indeed argued that the expansion of Islam, and the intense belief in a basic Muslim unity across geographical and political borders, created a first example of a global community. The Muslim umma, or community, knew no clear boundaries, but embraced all believers. Common commitment to Islamic law, the Sharia, along with the shared faith created genuine ties across long distances. So did the hadj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, which additionally allowed believers from many different regions to share news and experience and enhance a sense of shared commitment regardless of place. To a slightly lesser extent, common beliefs about the state, and the relations between religion and politics, spread widely, though particularly within the confines of the Arab caliphate. All of this was not mere theory. Muslim scholars, for example, could travel widely and participate actively in discussions of faith and law among groups of colleagues in any Islamic center (though there were divisions among different schools of thought, even aside from the major rift between Sunni and Shiite). Many traveling scholars earned money by giving lectures or working in local bureaucracies, again across a wide geographical reach. Of course, the Islamic world, the dar al-Islam or land of Islam, was not in fact the entire world, even in Afro-Eurasia. Muslims also identified a dar al-harb, or land of war, outside the Islamic purview – which in the centuries around 1000 CE particularly referred to Europe and East Asia. But the sense of shared endeavor created vital links for Muslims themselves and a larger context for wider exchange. All of this contributed to the crucial point, as far as the rest of Afro-Eurasia and not just the Islamic regions were concerned: that as Arabs gained a growing role in trans-regional trade, particularly in the Indian Ocean, they also helped expand its range, volume, and impact. Islam itself came to recognize an intermediate zone, a dar al-sulh or land of truce, which linked Islamic trade to neighboring territories that were outside the Muslim community but with which active relationships were both possible and desirable. Islamic energy pushed in a number of directions. Expeditions in the Red Sea, both commercial and military, began in the 7th century. By the early 8th century,

The Birth of Globalization?  41 Arabs had directly captured territory in what is today southern Pakistan, and planted commercial colonies in Indian port cities all along the Persian Gulf and also in Sri Lanka. Along with the growing activity in East Africa, this led to varied and vibrant exchanges of goods among Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent, going well beyond the luxury level that had largely characterized interregional activity previously. Africa contributed ivory, gold, and iron as well as slaves. Middle Eastern products included rugs, tools, jewelry, and cooking ware (iron and copper pots), while India offered cloth (particularly its fabled and colorful cottons), metal implements, and decorative beads, plus the highly valued spices. Exchanges pushed farther east to Thailand and Burma but also to south China. By the late 7th century, Arabs and Persians, as well as Indians and Malaysians, were listed by Chinese officials as ship owners working out of the port of Quanzhou (also called Zaiton). Arabs began importing Chinese porcelains, cloth, carpets, and glassware to East Africa. Porcelain, indeed, increasingly became the most important single Chinese export, surpassing silk (which now began to be produced in some other areas, such as the Byzantine Empire) despite the fact that it was both fragile and relatively heavy to ship. By the late 8th century, a significant colony of Arab merchants actually located in Quanzhou, where the Chinese allowed them to follow their own laws and establish their own system of judges. Disruptions occurred, to be sure; for example, the Chinese periodically tried to close Quanzhou to foreigners, but the importance of trade, and the merchants capable of maintaining it, survived the interruptions. Arab commercial forays (along with ongoing and often competitive Persian activity) brought involvement from other groups. Indian merchants began to settle in some of the Swahili ports of East Africa to oversee trade between that region and the subcontinent. Jewish merchants moved easily from the Mediterranean to China. As noted, Muslims in other parts of Asia began to gain their own growing role in Indian Ocean commerce. Arab connections furthered additional innovations. Partnerships developed between Arabs and local merchant houses, which helped organize more detailed commercial interactions. Bills of exchange were introduced, which facilitated payments for goods of distant origin, instead of requiring more direct barter on the spot in a port city. Wide agreement endorsed the use of gold and silver coins as mediums of exchange, but some traders were also willing to extend credit. Arab commercial law was recognized in a number of different regions, and the Arabs helped create a precedent in which commercial regulations might be seen as transcending individual political units – with the individual states agreeing because of the profits the larger trading system brought to local merchants and their contributions to tax revenues. This east–west network was reaching proportions that affected the daily lives of many producers and consumers alike. Significant numbers of people now valued goods that came from a different region, and while the emphasis still

42  Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE lay on personal and household adornment the range of goods, and the capacity to spread to consumers not in the top ranks of wealth, extended beyond prior levels. Key regions, particularly in parts of China, in turn came to depend on the production of manufactured items that would be sold in the trans-regional trade – to India, to the Middle East, to Africa and even beyond. China’s role as a production center for other parts of the world, such an obvious part of globalization today, was first established during the Tang and particularly the Song dynasties in the centuries around 1000 CE. Not surprisingly, the same intensification involved transmissions that went beyond the ranks of merchants themselves. Again, some precedent existed from earlier patterns, but the range and speed of these wider exchanges were quite new. Crops spread from one region to another on the heels of trade. Enhanced trade with India – even though it expanded on previous connections – now allowed Persians and Arabs to import sugar cane, saffron, and various rice grains that began to be grown locally and soon became staples of the regional diet. Knowledge of silk production was smuggled out of China – to the Byzantine Empire, for example, by some Syrian monks in the 6th century. Persia was also producing silk by this point. Chinese silks were still highly valued, but they now had to compete with regional production. New Chinese manufacturing methods for porcelain – introduced to allow a nonporous container for tea, which was becoming a popular Chinese drink at this same time – helped propel this good to its new prominence, particularly in trade with the Middle East. Here was an early example of how increased international exchange generated competition that reduced the product edge in one category – in this case, Chinese silk – forcing greater concentration on an additional, new specialty (porcelain) – a pattern that would become commonplace as globalization accelerated. Cultural exchanges were set in motion as well. A number of Arab scholars were sent to India to study advances in science and mathematics; by the 9th century, Arabs were introducing the superior Indian numbering system and the concept of zero into their own mathematics. Transmissions of this sort, becoming an integral part of interregional contact, prefigured the even more extensive contacts that have become a routine part of globalization. New Technology Arab commerce helped generate significant improvements in shipping technology, utilizing ideas from China and Southeast Asia as well as the Middle East itself. The innovations were not earthshaking in the sense of dramatically reducing the time needed for transportation or communication, but they did support growing use of the seas, initially in the Indian Ocean and later elsewhere, and a higher volume in the exchanges of heavy goods. Movement of bulk goods, like metals, became possible as never before. Along with the sheer expansion of east–west trade, the new shipping capacities provided another component in

The Birth of Globalization?  43 the series changes that generated a measurably different kind of trans-regional network from any of the patterns that had been established before. What was developing was a more sophisticated technological toolkit for ocean-borne trade, increasing the reliability of travel and extending the distances over which trade could be carried out successfully. The spread of these same innovations, part of the growing intensity of trans-regional connections, also allowed other peoples to begin to participate in more venturesome maritime travel, including additional groups from Southeast Asia but also the Europeans. Arabs gained new advantages as they learned navigational techniques and ship designs from Persian traders after their conquest of that region. Indeed, a variety of Persian words entered Arabic and would later, from Arab influence, penetrate Western languages as well – words like barge, lateen, helm, and anchor. Improvements in navigational devices were critical. Arabs directly introduced a device called the kamal which superseded the use of fingers held parallel to the horizon line to locate one’s position in relation to a known star. The kamal was fairly simple, with a card held by a wooden crossbar, but it did allow more accurate calculation. Sailors in the period also utilized a quadrant, a quarter-circle with a plumb line and markings to indicate position. Arabs also picked up and improved the astrolabe, a device initially introduced in classical Greece, translating Greek manuscripts on the subject into Arabic by the 8th century. Astrolabes allowed the calculation of heights of mountains or human structures, as well as accurately measuring the position of objects in the sky. They facilitated land-based as well as seagoing transportation, determining latitude and longitude though only approximately. The Arab astronomer al-Faraghani developed tables for calibrating astrolabes to every degree of latitude, making the device easier to use. Written work on astrolabes spread through the Islamic world, from Spain to Central Asia. Ultimately, through Spain, other Europeans learned of the device; the famous early English author Chaucer, among others, wrote a treatise on the subject. Even more important was the introduction and dissemination of the magnetic compass. Here was an instrument that could indicate direction in virtually any circumstance, in contrast to the astrolabe which greatly aided positioning but was of little use in a stormy sea because it needed to hang freely to find the horizon. Though some European historians once claimed that the compass must be of European origin, apparently on grounds that no other people could introduce such a clever device, it’s clear that the instrument originated in China at some point in the Han dynasty. It may initially have been used to help guide the arrangement of furniture, according to the principles of Feng shui, but this is not certain. And it was the navigational use, becoming very clear by the 7th century, which was really important. By that point, the Chinese knew that an iron needle could be magnetized by rubbing it with magnetite ore, and they were also able

44  Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE to use intense heat to magnetize a needle in a north–south direction. The needle could then be floated in a bowl of water, where it would spin until it pointed. By the 11th century, compasses used needles suspended in water, but also held by a pin or a silk thread. A Chinese military treatise in 1044 described a compass, and during the Song dynasty compasses were being used at sea to take bearings, particularly during cloudy weather when stars were not visible. Through trade contacts, or possibly by written descriptions that spread along land routes, the Arabs learned of the compass at least by the 13th century but probably well before. A story in 1233 told of how to use an iron, fish-shaped needle in a bowl of water to find direction. Another reference from the Red Sea, just 9 years later, describes placing a magnetized needle on a reed to allow it to float. Ahmed ibn Majid was the first to mount a magnetized needle on a revolving support above a compass face, doing away with the need for water, thus making the device more portable, and providing a clearer set of directions. His work also included detailed instructions for proper use of the compass at sea. By this time also, via the Arabs, Europeans were beginning to write about the compass; an English essay, by the Augustinian monk Alexander Neckham, first mentions the compass as a way to locate the North Star in bad weather; he probably heard of it in Italy. Trading city states like Venice and Genoa, and the crusades that brought European armies to the Middle East by the 12th century, were also involved in spreading knowledge of the compass. The first known example of a European compass comes from Italy sometime after 1253. Soon after this, both Arabs and Europeans were rapidly improving the device, mounting the needle on cards showing the different directions and setting it on swivels in order to keep it level on shipboard. This technique, probably devised in Syria and initially used for suspending incense burners without spilling their contents, generated designs that were also exported to Europe. But the Mediterranean was hardly the only center of ongoing development. Indonesian and other Southeast Asian sailors were appropriating the compass from Chinese and Arab merchants in the same period, and introducing their own improvements. Increasingly accurate charts, along with mapmaking more generally, added to the new navigational devices in facilitating oceanic travel. Pilot directions were written down with workmanlike and highly practical precision, reflecting repeated commercial voyages but also facilitating their replication and reducing uncertainty. Thus, an Arab pilot, Sulaiman iban Ahmed al-Mahri, recorded directions around the Indonesian islands and on toward China in 917 CE: The journey from Sundib and Farandib to Shati Jam is made in the direction ESE, from Shati Jam to the island of Zanjiliya is due south and from Zanjiliya to Najirashi, SSE …. From Pulua Sanbilan to the islands of Pulua Jumar is due south and from Pulua Jumar to the mountain of Pulua Basalar, SE by E, although some say ESE. Then from Pulua Basalar to Malacca it is SE, and from Malacca to Singpur, and this is the end of Siam to

The Birth of Globalization?  45 the South, and there the Little Bear is 5 degrees above the horizon …. the journey from Singpur to Ban-agah, where the Pole Star is 4 degrees above the horizon, is N. by W …. Then from Sharh-i-Naw to Cape Kanbusa, at 5 degrees P.S., is SE by E. From Kanbusa to Shanba at 7 degrees P.S. is NNE, and from Shanba to the Gulf of Kawashi at 10 degrees P.S. is NNW. Charts of this sort, widely distributed among merchants from various bases in the Indian Ocean, both reflected and promoted increasingly extensive trade. Shipping itself was the other main beneficiary of technological improvements, though they were less dramatic than in the navigational realm. A crucial development was the growing use of the lateen sail, both in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. Most early sails in the classical period and before had been square, which worked well when the wind was coming straight behind a vessel but had severe limitations otherwise – often necessitating the use of oarsmen to propel the boat in other conditions. Lateen sails were triangular, which allowed them to be maneuvered to catch winds coming from various directions; and they could be placed at the front and rear of a vessel. Both speed and flexibility benefited greatly from this innovation. Historians dispute when and where the lateen originated, with some claiming that the later Romans and Byzantines introduced them, others pointing to Arab use well before Islam. What is clear, and of prime importance, was that the Arabs perfected the sail and extended its use, providing models from which seamen in other societies would learn. Arab ships, called dhows, came to dominate Indian Ocean trade by 1000 CE. They were relatively large boats with transverse watertight bulkheads reducing – though as we have seen, not eliminating – the danger of sinking. Holes and gaps were closed with tree gum and coconut fiber. Wicker rails prevented waves from breaking over the ship’s bulwark. Dhows had two masts, each with a lateen sail. They could move quite rapidly when the sails were spread wide, but they could also maneuver readily when the sails were raised in a high triangle, sailing in zigzag tacks into the wind. When guided by the use of the compass and the other navigational devices, and benefiting from the rudder-based steering that the Chinese had introduced, Arab ships seemed ideally suited to take advantage of wind patterns in the Indian ocean, including down the African coast, but they could also be adapted to other settings. Many features of their design would spread to Europe as Arab and European trading contacts accelerated by the 11th and 12th centuries, and indeed the Portuguese vessels (caravelles) that began to introduce a new chapter in Europe’s relations with the wider world, by the 15th century, were explicit adaptations of the dhow. In Arab hands, the dhows allowed faster and long trips and the transport of bulk cargoes such as foodstuffs, metals, and manufactured goods – like the Chinese porcelain that was becoming so widely sought after. Arab dhows could range up to 400 tons, with crews of 30 that provided some oarsmen to supplement primary reliance on the wind.

46  Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE The next set of shipbuilding innovations came in fact from the Chinese. Chinese junks – so called from a Malay word, djong, for boat – had been introduced in the Han dynasty, However, their wider deployment and growing sophistication dated to the Song dynasty and its great trading outreach. Here too, developments facilitated more complex and capacious trading ventures at the time – feeding the 11th-century turning point in trans-regional contacts – and at the same time provided models that other seagoing peoples could copy and adapt. European sailors would be indebted to Chinese as well as Arab shipbuilders. Junks were strong, heavy ships, some of them quite large, and capable of sailing both in the South China Sea and in the Indian Ocean. Hulls were divided into watertight compartments, so that if one began to leak, the ship would not sink. (One result of this was that relatively few remains of early junks have been found, in contrast to Arab and Persian shipping, because wrecks were so rare.) The ships could carry heavy cargoes and large crews. Designs and capacities improved steadily during the Song dynasty, by which time some ships were built that were over 200 feet long (and some scholars argue they may have been even larger, at least by the 15th century), capable of carrying not only goods but considerable armed force and also gardens and animals for the provision of fresh food. The strength and maneuverability of the junks, including of course their use of rudders, as well as their massive size, were well ahead of the types of ships available in the same period in the Mediterranean. Here, clearly, was another set of innovations in transportation that reflected the growing importance of oceanic trade and stimulated further activity in turn. New Routes The final basic innovation in trans-regional contacts, particularly important for Africa and Europe but also embracing Japan and Southeast Asia, involved the development of feeder routes that connected additional societies to the AfroEurasian trading network. Many of these routes ran north–south, thus obviously helping new regions link to the fundamental east–west axis that the Arabs and others were extending. One important new network connected West Africa with North Africa and the Mediterranean; and of course East Africa was now actively trading with the Middle East directly, through the Indian Ocean. Merchants from Scandinavia interacted with their counterparts from the Byzantine Empire and the Arab world, involving western Russia and Ukraine in interregional trade for the first time. In Western Europe, trade from England and the Low Countries would connect with the Mediterranean, and thence to the Byzantine Empire and the Arab caliphate. Finally, though this was an east-west supplement rather than north to south, Japan began to exchange actively with Korea and China. The expansion was considerable, and varied.

The Birth of Globalization?  47 Trade from West Africa across the Sahara to the north, particularly from the emerging empire of Ghana, began fairly early, by 600 CE or so, on the basis of African merchant activity moving out from growing cities. Africans brought goods from forested regions, including gold but also dried fish, copper, and other items, in dugout boats in the delta of the Niger River, where they met nomadic traders from the Sahara who offered salt and other products. This pattern was soon joined and amplified by Muslim merchants, including Arabs, coming south. For a time, mixed settlements developed embracing merchant groups from both directions. Travel times of 3 months or more were not uncommon. West African rulers vigorously encouraged the trade because of the new products it generated but more obviously still for the tax revenues they could derive. As in the Middle East, governments set up inns where groups of travelers could lodge. From North Africa came an increasing array of manufactured products, including glass beads and pottery, but also large stocks of horses, whose breeding was difficult in the sub-Saharan regions. Most of the exchange products came from North Africa or the adjacent Middle East, but even luxury Chinese goods and Indian glassware have been discovered in the West African centers. Gold continued to serve as the basis for the African offerings, but other products entered in as well, including ivory; archeologists have discovered a mid-9th-century pit with over 50 hippopotamus tusks destined for export to the north. Slaves were also traded, though less extensively than along the Swahili routes in East Africa. These exchange patterns led of course to wider connections and to frequent Arab commentary on African conditions. A number of Africans, including major rulers, converted to Islam and used North African bureaucrats to help run their vast domains. Relationships with Islam were complex, however; there were few mass conversions yet in sub-Saharan Africa. Some regions were particularly resistant, in ways that had to be balanced against trade needs. Thus, Ak-Umari, writing in the 14th century about the great empire of Mali, noted that the people in one gold-producing province were “uncouth infidels.” But their products were so valuable that Muslims rulers left them alone in return for a regular tribute payment in gold. On the other hand, in other parts of Mali, and particularly the great town of Timbuktu, with 75,000 inhabitants, many scholars visited from different parts of the Islamic world; there were 7,500 students in all. And several African leaders, most notably Mansa Musa, traveled out of the region to Mecca, spreading the reputation for wealth in gold in the process. The opening of a major route from western Africa to the Mediterranean and beyond thus rested primarily on trade, but with considerably wider potential particularly in terms of cultural contacts. Other new routes developed as well, though with products for the most part of somewhat lesser value. By the 9th and 10th centuries, traders were actively working connections between Scandinavia and the Byzantine Empire, with Constantinople as a key exchange point. Presumably, Scandinavian traders

48  Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE introduced the first ventures, using overland and river routes through what is now western Russia and Ukraine, with intermediary cities like Kyiv growing up in response. They carried honey, furs, amber, and craft goods, trading for textiles, pottery and glass, and spices, along with fine metal products. But Byzantine traders and Christian missionaries were soon active as well, and many Arab merchants became directly involved. In 921, Ibn Fadlan led a party from Baghdad as an emissary from the caliph, seeking to meet the “King of the Slavs.” The king had sent a letter asking for someone who could teach them about Islam and set up a mosque. The trip covered 1,500 miles, through dense forests and along the Volga and Dnieper rivers. Fadlan’s report provided information for Arab geographers and travel writers, and encouraged further contacts (though the Russians in the end decided against adopting Islam). Fadlan was intrigued by the appearance of the Russians: I have never seen people with a more developed bodily stature than they. They are as tall as date palms, blond and ruddy, so that they do not need to wear a tunic nor a cloak; rather the men among them wear a garment that only covers half of his body and leaves one of his hands free. Many Russian habits, including even the ways they bargained and traded, seemed strange, but this did not prevent vigorous mutual engagement. The many Arab coins found in Scandinavia testify to the range of activity, which came to include some commerce in slaves as well. Arab outreach also widened connections with central Asia, though here the routes were not entirely new but rather built upon earlier Silk Road patterns. Central Asian products found increasing markets, so that the region was no longer simply a passage point for Chinese goods. Various kinds of manufacturing expanded to take advantage of the export opportunities. Writing about 985, the Islamic geographer al-Muqaddasi cited a long list of exports, including rugs, lamps, various kinds of soaps as well as furs, leather goods, and various foods. “There is nothing to equal the meats of Bukhara, and a kind of melon they have called ash-shaq, nor the bows of Khorezmia, the porcelain of Shash, and the paper of Samarkand.” Traders also moved north, connecting with tribes in Siberia and using sleds when possible. Here, long-distance linkages were unprecedented, and one tribe was cited as being so unfamiliar with the whole process that they would simply bring goods to an exchange point and then vanish, coming back the next day to collect what the traders had left in exchange. The new Japanese routes to Korea and China constituted another expansion of the overall system of connections, though the distances involved were less vast than in the case of the north–south routes in West Africa and Eastern Europe. Contacts with Korea came first, and for a while the Koreans served as middlemen between Japan and China, but then the Japanese organized direct seaborne links to China as well. Trade involved products like timber and

The Birth of Globalization?  49 mercury from Japan, in return for manufactured goods from Korea and China (but also, through China, from places like India). Merchant groups and even artisans, particularly from Korea, moved along these routes too, settling in Japan in some numbers. Cultural exchange followed, and as we will see Japan ultimately established fairly formal systems for studying Chinese ways. Buddhism spread, and although some Japanese objected the contact system itself provided persuasive motivation; as one observer put it, looking at Korea, China, and beyond, “All the states of the Western foreigners worship it [Buddhism] – how could Japan alone turn its back?” This process brought missionaries as well, particularly from China but also from India (in small number); and it widened the demand for goods from other parts of Asia to serve Buddhist religious rituals. One final set of routes opened or reopened in this period, though a bit more haphazardly. Western Europe continued to engage in some Mediterranean trade even after the fall of the Roman Empire. Gradually, more north–south activity developed within this part of the European continent, bringing English, German, and Dutch merchants to the Mediterranean. Italian cities began to expand based on their obvious advantages in linking goods from other parts of Europe with the wider reaches of the Mediterranean, sponsoring exchanges with Arabs and Byzantines alike. But southern French ports and merchants also played some role in connecting Western Europe generally to interactions with Asia, as mediated by merchants in Egypt or the Middle East. Overall, the development of new linkages enhanced both the impact and the complexity of patterns of interaction by 1000 CE. New parts of Africa, Europe, and Asia were increasingly engaged, even as primary focus rested still on east– west exchanges through the Indian Ocean. The geography of contact was much richer than it had been in the classical period, which meant not only the involvement of more regions and more people but also a wider array of products and new opportunities for cultural connections as well. Impacts The Scope of Exchange

The emergence of a new trans-regional context initially under Arab stimulus, the innovations in the technologies and methods of trade and travel, and the range of routes forming networks of contact among Africa, Asia, and Europe added up to significant change in the sheer availability of interactions among the major societies of these three continents. The resulting network generated important shifts in the nature of exchange, accelerating the mutual influences possible when societies encounter each other – building on, but surpassing, the obvious intensification of trade. Here is where the idea of a quietly revolutionary turn to trans-regional convergences comes in. Exchanges happened more quickly than before on various fronts and over a wider range of activities. This transformation

50  Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE was exactly what one should expect from the more specific shifts in navigation devices or regional trade routes – otherwise the claims of a new network would have little practical meaning. The key developments in the heightened dissemination of techniques and ideas and the establishment of deliberate patterns of imitation arguably represent a definable – if admittedly still early – phase of what we now know as globalization. Techniques and Tastes

Transfers of technological knowhow and, to a lesser degree, consumer preferences clearly illustrate the possibilities created by the new network. Paper is a prime example. The product was invented in China by the 1st century CE – this is when we have the first examples of uses of the material for writing. Different methods for making paper proliferated in China, including ways to lower manufacturing costs. By the 3rd and 4th centuries, not only the product but also the production technologies were being passed into Korea and Vietnam, and soon thereafter to Japan – following on China’s orbit of influence in the late classical period. It was striking, of course, that paper did not capture interest more broadly, given its huge advantages over all other writing materials in cost and ease of manufacture – but despite classical trade links to China, mutual knowledge was simply not extensive enough to break the barriers of distance and unfamiliarity. India, it has been speculated, had some cultural reasons for aversion to paper, and knowledge of China was simply not intense enough in other parts of Asia for paper to have become a priority item. This changed dramatically with the arrival of the Arabs and a new pace of interactions with China. As trade and military activity took Arabs into Central Asia, they learned of Chinese paper at least by the 8th century. One story holds that Arabs captured some Chinese prisoners in the battle of Talas River in 751, a few of whom were skilled in the manufacture of paper. A factory was established in Baghdad on the basis of their knowledge. More recent accounts cast doubt on this story, emphasizing more general exchanges in Central Asia; but there is no question that Arabs learned of paper at about this point and soon, headed by adoption by the caliphate government itself, began to use it widely. The product – far cheaper and more flexible than the animal skins used for writing previously in many parts of the Middle East – caught on rapidly, for religious and artistic use as well as its role among government bureaucrats. By the 10th century, mills were producing paper through the Arab world and beyond, in Persia, Egypt, and Spain as well as Mesopotamia. Christian interest developed a bit more slowly: literacy levels were lower in Western Europe, and government bureaucracies more limited; here was one of many cases where a product that became known through global exchange was not adopted as rapidly as might have been expected. However, by the 11th century, paper was spreading to non-Muslim Europe with the first production facility established in Sicily, relatively close to the Arab centers.

The Birth of Globalization?  51 The result of the dissemination of paper, first in Islam and then beyond, was an explosion of books and records, vital to commercial transactions, administrative operations, and religious training alike. Centers of learning in West Africa also quickly benefited from the literacy and scholarship that paper could support. There are two key points here: first, a clearly superior product that had been available but not widely known in the classical period now begins to move out into other societies in the hemispheric network of Asia, Africa, and Europe at a relatively rapid if slightly uneven pace. The dissemination process, admittedly, still took many decades, but the speed was far greater than anything that emerged from past patterns of technology diffusion. Second, paper, because of its particular importance in supporting the spread of information, facilitated other kinds of exchanges, such as the translation into Arabic of knowledge and scholarship from India, Persia, China, and elsewhere – including earlier Greek scientific and philosophical texts. It became another component of the acceleration of communication among societies, in a process that would soon spread beyond the Arab world to Europe. Obviously, the rapid spread of navigational devices like the compass, often partly on the basis of manuals written on paper, formed another important part of the acceleration of exchange. So, though less familiar, did the growing interest in finding up-to-date methods of manufacturing steel. India, in the classical period, had developed the most advanced steel technology, adding ingredients to molten iron that produced a harder but more flexible metal that was preferable for certain kinds of products – including sword blades. By the late classical period, steel blocks, or eggs, were being traded along the Indian coast and across the Gulf to the Middle East. In the context of the kind of trading network that emerged by 1000 CE, merely trading for steel was unnecessarily indirect: it was better to learn how to make it oneself. Techniques of steel production in India began to be taken to the Middle East, and with the expansion of Islam, well beyond. It was in the 12th century that the Muslim geographer al-Idrisi wrote, “The Hindus excelled in the manufacture of iron and it is impossible to find anything to surpass the edge from Hinduwani or Indian steel.” Muslim scientists like al-Biruni, Ibn Sina, and al-Kindi wrote about Indian steel in their studies of technology. Knowledge of steel production also spread east, to Indonesia, but also westward to Spain, where Toledo blades became famous through the European and Mediterranean zones. Another Arab geographer, Ibn Hawqal, wrote in 977 that “Toledo, like Damascus, was known throughout the world for its swords.” Greater speed in the dissemination of technology, but also a greater sense of intentionality, so that experts in one society began to think explicitly about what they could learn from counterparts in another, marked an important new step in the history of interregional contacts and their impact. Developments in the area of taste were in some ways less decisively new. After all, merchants in the classical period had already discovered that certain

52  Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE regionally specific items, once entered into interregional trade, could spark keen consumer attachments. Pepper from India was an established example for people around the Mediterranean basin. It was important, nevertheless, that the roster of consumer preferences that depended on long-distance exchange expanded noticeably during the centuries around 1000 CE. Upper-class clientele continued to predominate – mass consumer globalization was still in the future – but there was some growth in the customer base as well. Tea was a case in point. Tea use seems first to have developed in China late in the classical period, indeed after the fall of the great Han dynasty. The first dictionary reference comes from 350 CE. By the 5th century, nomadic Turkic traders had carried tea into Central Asia, and by the 6th century its use also spread to Japan. By the 9th century, tea was one of the commodities regularly carried by overland traders from China to India. The migration of Turkic peoples into the Middle East helped spread trade in tea, with consumer tastes developing in Persia and among the Arabs, ultimately penetrating the Mediterranean as well. Tea reached Europe proper only a bit later, in the 16th century, introduced by Italian merchants as a health drink. Here was a clear case of the development of an interregional consumer interest, often paired with a certain sense of ritual and the use of cups and vessels, normally made from porcelain, which also depended on trans-regional trade and aesthetic standards. Sugar gained ground independently, and proved to be even more important. Sugar cane was probably originally native to parts of Indonesia, but cultivation gradually spread to other parts of Southeast Asia and to India. It was in India, by the 4th century BCE, that processes were invented to extract crystals from the cane, so that sugar itself, rather than cane-chewing, began to gain attention. Persians, fighting in India, learned about sugar, which one emperor termed “the reed which gives honey without bees.” Early sugar cultivators, however, tried to guard the secrets of their production methods, because so much money could be made in exports. As we have seen, sugar was one of the products involved in classical trade in the Indian Ocean. The Arabs began to expand the impact of sugar once they learned the production process from their conquests of Persia. Extensive sugar-growing estates were combined with large refineries. Most of the production was for domestic consumption, but obviously Arab expansion spread awareness of the commodity to more distant areas such as North Africa, Spain, and Sicily. Other Europeans began to encounter sugar by the 11th century. The first mention of sugar in England comes from 1099, but the product’s popularity soared still further in the next century as a result of European crusaders’ exposure in the Holy Land. Eagerness for the product expanded rapidly, creating a demand that could only with difficulty be matched by exports from the regions capable of growing cane. An English king had difficulty finding any sugar for a banquet he was organizing in the 13th century. By 1319, sugar in England was selling at a rate equivalent (in contemporary terms) to $50 a pound. The beginnings of a globalization in

The Birth of Globalization?  53 the taste for sugar, obviously accelerating after 1000 CE, would have further consequences for trans-regional contacts later on, but the importance of this new phase of trade and mutual influence, even in matters of personal taste, preconditioned all the later developments. Basic products like tea or sugar were not alone in inciting changes in taste. Trans-regional transmission of fashion moved forward in this period as well. The attractiveness of silk was, of course, already established, so there was a basis already set. But in this period, certain African furs and feathers won attention as fashion symbols as far east as Mongolia – again, a tribute to the expanding range of exports. Tall hats introduced for women in China would gradually make their way to France, where they became stylish accessories for aristocratic women by the later Middle Ages – even though the women involved probably had no notion of the product’s point of origin. Indian cotton textiles, as already suggested, probably were the clearest success story in terms of influencing broad consumer tastes. Indian artisans in several regions learned to respond to regional preferences, in terms of distinctive patterns and colors, while establishing a common fascination with the vividness and flexibility of cotton cloth for consumers from East Africa to the Middle East and Persia, from Central Asia to Indonesia and Japan. To be sure, some societies reacted against these foreign influences, as signaling excessive interest in luxury: various European centers tried to enact laws banning Chinese silks, and they would later turn against cotton as well on occasion. But these laws, not usually entirely effective, were themselves proof positive of the challenge of foreign influence. Cultural Imitations

Another vital area of increasing trans-regional influence involved certain kinds of cultural apparatus, and some larger cultural patterns. Here was another case where regions began to learn from each other. Certain areas, more recently venturing into more formal political structures, tried to accelerate their advance by deliberately studying and copying other societies. The spread of missionary religions had already accelerated the process of cultural contact – for example, with the spread of Buddhism into China by the 3rd century CE, including mutual travel by students and missionaries to and from India; or the movement of Christianity beyond Roman borders. With early globalization, cultural diffusion extended even more broadly, and in some cases it included ambitious efforts by students to take advantage of centers of learning in neighboring regions. The spread of the Indian numbering system, with associated features like the concept of zero and decimal notations, formed a particularly clear example of the new traveling power of improvements in intellectual toolkits. The superior numbering system, devised by Hindu scholars beginning as early as 300 BCE and already copied, within India, by Buddhists, reached Persia well before the middle of the 9th century. The Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, writing in

54  Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE Arabic, described calculations with “Hindu numerals” in 825, and an Arab mathematician also highlighted the concepts just 5 years later. Older numbering systems survived in the Middle East until recent times, even in commerce, though Arab use of the numbers for bookkeeping would encourage their adoption by merchants in other areas such as Italy. And by the 10th century, a distinctive West Arabic version of the symbols began to spread in North Africa and Spain. The first mention of the numerals in Western Europe occurred in 976, and by the 980s Gerbert of Aurillas (later Pope Silvester II), who had studied in northern Spain, began to spread knowledge of the numerals more widely. An Italian mathematician, Leonardo Fibonacci, who had traveled to North Africa for his education, provided further impetus around 1200, as his training in accounting introduced him to the numbers which “very soon pleased me above all else.” Here, widespread use developed more hesitantly, as many Europeans remained attached to older systems; routine reliance on what were misleadingly called “Arabic” numerals in Europe awaited the middle of the 16th century. Finally, it was through later European influence that the system spread still further, ultimately to East Asia and other parts of Africa as well as the Americas. Not a quick or uniform global journey, to be sure, but an indication of the power of transmission that had newly developed, from the Arabian center, by the 11th century. Other cultural influences, aside from the world religions themselves, had a somewhat more circumscribed range, typically involving neighboring regions rather than wider impact. Here too, however, there was measurable innovation, as several societies where complex political and social patterns were newly taking hold intentionally sent student missions to more powerful states, hoping to learn a variety of secrets for success. The process began before 1000, but it ultimately fed into the larger sense of interregional connection. Thus, Japan launched a period of intense study of Chinese values and institutions in the 4th and 5th centuries under the leadership of the powerful Yamato clan. Chinese writing was introduced, with Chinese scribes brought over to make copies of major Chinese books and to help interpret them. Later, Japanese students and scholars who were fluent in Chinese began to be sent directly to China to further the learning process. The resulting imports were considerable: Chinese script was adapted to the very different Japanese language, giving the Japanese a written culture for the first time. Both Buddhist and Confucian ideas were widely imported, with Buddhist missionaries initially taking the lead. Other Chinese cultural forms, from styles of poetry to martial arts and sculpted gardening, were brought over and integrated into Japanese life. Both architecture and painting reflected the growing Chinese influence. Japanese literature filled with references to Chinese classical writings. New tools and techniques were introduced too, from Korea as well as China, contributing to rising agricultural output but also helping to launch a serious mining sector for the first time. Chinese legal codes established a more patriarchal family structure in Japan, ultimately worsening the position of women – though the most extreme

The Birth of Globalization?  55 practices, like foot binding, were not adopted. Also following Chinese example, Japanese aristocrats began to engage in polygamy. For a time, the Japanese royal court also tried to follow the elaborate ceremonialism of its Chinese counterpart. At one point, the Japanese emperor even added “son of heaven” to his many other titles. This opening to the outside was not unchallenged – just as later exposures to external influences, in Japan and elsewhere, would rouse concerns from various people eager to defend established identities. Many aristocrats, for example, fought against the attempts to set up a powerful, Chinese-style central bureaucracy. Indeed, efforts at this point to imitate outside political institutions largely failed. The Japanese leaders abandoned the practice of sending regular official visits to China in the 9th century, though trade and cultural exchange continued at a high level. Clearly, despite massive imports, Japanese and Chinese societies did not merge into a single pattern. Still, the long period of deliberate and extensive imitation transformed Japanese life in fundamental ways. Other patterns of intentional imitation opened up a bit later. Russian commercial interactions with the Byzantine Empire, along with Byzantine missionary activity, led to substantial but essentially one-way exchange. From Byzantium, Russia would copy Christianity, including the Orthodox definition of the appropriate relationship between church and state, and with this a host of artistic forms particularly in the religious realm. Russian icons were a direct response to Byzantine example. An adapted Greek alphabet, called Cyrillic, gave Russians access to writing for the first time. As in Japan’s experience with China, Russian interest in Byzantine political systems proved hard to implement, but some ideas, particularly about the importance of empire, did take root and affected Russian political forms later on. Western Europe by the 11th century was actively staking out patterns of imitation as well. Political leaders, though sometimes aware of the sophistication of the Byzantine Empire and Arab caliphate, did little to sponsor direct study. This was not true for merchants, who were eager to copy the successful methods of their Arab brethren; a key result was the importation into Europe of the idea of commercial laws that might transcend specific political boundaries. Students of science, mathematics, and philosophy were at least as zealous, with many groups visiting scholarly centers in Islamic Spain or North Africa, as well as Byzantium. The goal of these missions rested in part on an interest in recovering classical Greek and Hellenistic materials, often better preserved in the Arab and Byzantine domains. But interpretations of classical science and philosophy entered into the picture as well, with Arab philosophers like Ibn Rushd (known in the West as Averroes), who worked on issues such as the relationship between faith and reason, playing a huge role in setting up leading intellectual debates. Arab achievements in mathematics also drew Western students directly, as with Leonardo Fibonacci; this kind of contact even brought Arab words like algebra into Western languages, in acknowledgement of the importance of their

56  Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE contributions. Arab discoveries in medicine also gained wide influence, while work in optics directly inspired another research area in Europe. More broadly, experience with Arab centers of higher learning may have helped inspire the establishment of early European universities, though this remains a subject of debate. What is clear is that the varied opportunities to learn from the Arabs galvanized wide sectors of European intellectual life by the 12th century. The kinds of trade and religious contacts developing from 1000 CE onward generated cultural and political imitations in sub-Saharan Africa (looking to the larger Islamic world) and Southeast Asia as well. But it was the explicitness of the foreign study programs issuing from Japan, Western Europe, and Russia that were particularly interesting, through the acknowledgement of the importance of learning from other places. This attitude could carry over into later phases of globalization as well, though the legacy was complex. Japan thus developed its main response to modern globalization from 1868 onward, including an impressive interest in selective imitation, in part because its leaders could recall the success of the previous openness to Chinese example in providing demonstrable gains without ultimate loss of identity. To be sure, the efforts around 1000 CE involved neighboring regions, not the more distant models that some societies have had to chase more recently. But the patterns set at this point help explain why later, even more venturesome outreach would be conceivable. The Travelers and Expanded Regional Knowledge The emergence of more ambitious long-distance travelers was a final example of the kinds of impact the new trans-regional network began to have, at least within a few centuries. The known travelers were obviously a small minority, but their initiatives helped to put a human face on the new routes and technologies for communication. They reflect rising levels of interest as well as new opportunity. Where vivid travel accounts resulted, the consequences of their ventures added to the available information on the wider world and could spur others – like Christopher Columbus – to further efforts later on. While the most famous travelers of the period, notably Marco Polo from Europe and Ibn Battuta from North Africa, operated a few centuries after 1000, the precedent for more venturesome travel was established earlier. It was by the 9th century, for example, that merchants and seamen from the Middle East, embarking from ports in the Persian Gulf, began regularly to cover the 6,000 miles to the Pacific harbors of southern China, a trip that probably took at least 6 months. A Persian book early in the 10th century, The Account of China and India, began to put these experiences into written form, offering information and the sense of enticement that distant voyages could generate. Other books, mainly by Persian sailors, offered vivid titles like the Book of the Wonders of India, with stories about other parts of Asia as well as India and a dramatic sense of the exotic adventure and profit travel could bring.

The Birth of Globalization?  57 Religion continued to spur travel as well, particularly given the pilgrimage goals of pious Muslims. As Islam expanded, trips of 400 miles or more, for example from Central Asia to Mecca, became increasingly common, often involving individuals (including women) who otherwise would not normally be counted among the most venturesome. Religion and trade combined to supply regular caravans of camels or donkeys, moving through various parts of Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, and benefiting as well from the inns that were open at set intervals throughout the region. By the 12th century, religious travelers from West Africa, crossing the Sahara and then moving east along the Mediterranean, added to the pilgrims to Mecca. This was the context in which the greatest traveler of the age, Ibn Battuta (b. 1304), launched his amazing series of voyages. Initially motivated by the religious pilgrimage to Mecca, to which he (like many Muslims) added side trips to other cities in the region, Ibn Battuta clearly caught an unusually fierce appetite for travel, from his early 20s into middle age, when he finally settled down back in Morocco and plied his profession as a lawyer. Deep interest in seeing new things, continued religious motivation in exploring the expanses of the dar al-Islam, a desire for professional adventure – Battuta often took up jobs in Muslim governments in places like India – all combined. At some points also, a fair dose of sexual appetite probably entered in (Battuta periodically married and then divorced women in some of his stops, like the Maldive Islands) – all sorts of stimuli kept him going at an almost nonstop pace. The distances covered were truly unusual, but equally important was the fact that Battuta was working largely within a well-established system that illustrated how far the connections among major societies had advanced. Pushing beyond the Middle East proper, Battuta visited Somalia on the African coast and also (while in principle heading for India, where he hoped to get a job) went deep into Central Asia, heading up the Volga River into Mongol-­ dominated Russia. Doubling back to the Byzantine Empire, on a multi-year trip, he did finally end up in India, staying (unusually for him) 6 years and encountering a number of adventures with bandits once he tried to leave. His next goal was China, but again he wandered around considerably in the process, hitting the Maldives and also Sri Lanka. His ultimate stay in China was his only prolonged experience outside the Islamic orbit, and his reactions were interesting (and not totally strange to some global travelers even in our own day, when societies have converged far more than they had at that point). He recognized China’s achievements and importance, but he could not feel at ease. China was beautiful, but it did not please me. On the contrary, I was very worried by the fact that the heathen have the upper hand there. When I left my house, I saw countless dreadful things. That disturbed me so much that I stayed home and only went out when I was forced to do so. When I saw Muslims in China, I felt as though I was seeing my own kith and kin.

58  Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE This was hardly the last time that an increase in global contacts would take people out of their comfort zone. Battuta claimed to have traveled fairly widely in China, and despite his general lack of enthusiasm he did offer some excited comments about the qualities of the great Chinese ships. On the way home, he stopped in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia. Then a final trip, in the mid-14th century, took him to the great empire of Mali in West Africa. A final cluster of major travelers involved the growing number of West Europeans who began to make their way to China, using land routes, Indian Ocean connections, or some combination. Merchants and missionaries headed the list – the Catholic Pope sent several missions to China in hopes of encouraging conversions. But there were also scattered entertainers and others eager for some combination of adventure and profit. The most famous, and certainly the most influential, of these European travelers was the Venetian Marco Polo, who used a previous trip by his uncles, from Persia to China, as precedent for forging a major expedition of his own. Polo, with his uncles, crossed into western China in 1273, after 2 years spent covering the 8000 miles from the Mediterranean to the Middle East and Persia; it would take another year to reach the Chinese heartland. (The long travel times involved in this sort of venture help explain among other things how language barriers might be negotiated: a traveler could pick up at least a smattering of a new language – in the case of the Polos, Mongolian – while negotiating the transit itself.) Although Polo certainly recognized that the Chinese were “idolaters,” in that they were not Christian, his admiration for Chinese political and urban achievements, and consumer prosperity, overcame any sense of strangeness – in obvious contrast to Battuta’s reactions. Polo’s later account, widely read in Europe by would-be adventurers over many centuries, made Chinese superiority very clear – in turn a clear motivation for Europeans to learn more from the Chinese and to find ways through trade to gain directly some of the benefits of Chinese achievements. Both trade and travel, finally, generated an even wider literature about distant places and the excitement of foreign lands. A century after Marco Polo’s account, an Englishman calling himself Sir John Mandaville wrote a book simply called Travels. It was largely fanciful, though many readers thought it reflected real journeys, as it described amazing people (like those who grew only one leg, in Ethiopia, which they used as an umbrella when they were sitting down) and massive treasures of gold in Africa and Asia. Work of this sort continued to stimulate wide interest – Christopher Columbus carried a copy of Travels, along with Polo’s account – with its implications of the vast wealth and excitement that foreign ventures might bring. The combination of expanding knowledge and excited misinformation involved more than European publics, in this age of new trans-regional contacts. Chinese readers now could learn at least a bit about Africa. Direct Chinese

The Birth of Globalization?  59 merchant contact with East Africa expanded in the early 15th century for a few decades, but even before then the interactions Chinese had with Persian and Arab merchants who had also visited Africa, a small number of African slaves directly traded to China, and the interest in African goods and exotic animals combined to produce some sense of what Africa was like and why it might be interesting. Travel and interregional knowledge, then, though still limited if judged by the standards of our own time, expanded rapidly, even creating some of the issues about oversimplification and regional stereotyping that globalization can still involve today. The results unquestionably set a basis for further activity, as the cycle of trans-regional contacts ratcheted upward. Regional Patterns More and more regions were affected by significant contacts around 1000 CE – this is why historians can talk about a genuine if “archaic” phase of globalization. But the nature of involvements varied, and this was important both at the time and as a forerunner to later differentiations. Obviously, the Americas, Australia-New Zealand, and Pacific Oceania were the most singular regions, with no effective contact with the trans-regional network at all. This left these areas unable to take advantage of the technologies or the range of domesticated animals available in Afro-Eurasia; it also left these populations without resistance to some of the diseases that were common elsewhere. None of this directly affected these regions at this point – they prospered in many ways – but it set them up for uncomfortable encounters later on. Several regions participated in trans-regional contacts in distinctive ways. African merchants traded actively across the Sahara and with the Middle East, but they depended on Arab merchants for access to goods from other regions and for shipping. Russia, heavily involved in trade with Byzantium and with the Arabs, did not generate a far-flung merchant class, and its geography and climate limited its maritime activities. Japan reached out to Korea and China but not beyond, depending on these contacts for any access to the wider world. Several regions, in other words, though heavily involved with new trans-regional contacts, relied on others for the most ambitious trans-regional outreach. Western Europe displayed some of the same features. It relied primarily on Arab merchants for access to goods from other parts of Asia. This dependence caused some active discontent, however. Europeans resented the higher prices Arab merchants charged, and as Christians were somewhat uncomfortable with reliance on Islamic traders as well. Europe also suffered from what today would be called a balance of payment problem: increasingly eager for access to Asian goods like sugar or silk, Europe itself generated few products of interest on the trans-regional market. These issues help explain some new European initiatives within a few centuries after 1000 CE.

60  Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE China was a full and successful participant in trans-regional trade, with the strongest manufacturing sector of the period. Chinese merchants traded directly with many parts of east and southeast Asia. Except for a brief though intriguing moment after 1400, however, China relied heavily on other merchants, like the Arabs, to disseminate its goods more widely. And while China was affected by the world religions – particularly Buddhism, but with a new Muslim minority on its western borders – Chinese culture was less influenced by missionary religions than was true in other parts of Afro-Eurasia. India’s trading position suffered a bit with the rise of Arab activity, but many Indian merchants, including groups that converted to Islam, gained a growing role later on; similarly, southeast Asian commerce, again including participation by Muslims as Islam spread in this region, acquired growing importance as well. By the same token, Arab dominance in trans-regional trade, so vital in the centuries leading up to 1000 CE, began to decline a bit in face of growing competition. Each region, in other words, had something of its own style in its participation in the trans-regional exchanges. And regional patterns also changed in the centuries after 1000 CE, as some groups sought to take new advantage of the network while other regions fell back a bit. This phase of globalization, like the more recent phases, encouraged shifting regional dynamics. 1000 CE and the Stages of Globalization The innovations linked to the accelerating levels of trans-regional contacts had costs and benefits – as has been true of every stage in the globalization process including right now. On the costs side: the 14th century saw an unprecedentedly rapid spread of contagious disease. A new round of bubonic plague – what would come to be called in Europe the Black Death – originated in western China early in the century. Within a few decades it had spread, thanks to trade, not only to other parts of China but through the Indian Ocean to the Middle East and North Africa, where it would carry away well over a quarter of the population. Another decade or so saw the same plague in Italy and thence northward in Europe, where it had the same catastrophic effects. Diseases carried from other parts of the world, which resulted in high mortality, were not new – the later centuries of the classical period had seen interregional contagion. But an impact this rapid and quickly catastrophic was new in world history, though it would recur at various points later on. More extensive and swifter contacts had a price. On the plus side: in addition to new goods and excitement, trans-regional contacts might begin to create some sense of shared humanity across the various political and religious divisions that obviously still marked the world. It was also in the 14th century that a Chinese observer, Wang Li, could make the claim that with new levels of exchange, “civilization had spread everywhere, and no

The Birth of Globalization?  61 more barriers existed …. Brotherhood among peoples has certainly reached a new plane.” Exaggerated, to be sure, as are some of the more optimistic claims about globalization today. But the fact that the notion could even be put forward might suggest a novel stage in human interactions. So was all this – the networks that had developed by 1000 CE, the consequences that would continue to build during the ensuing two to three centuries – a definable first phase of globalization? That a new stage of interactions was emerging compared with the more fitful patterns of the classical era seems incontestable (though some scholars who explore previous trade connections would put up a bit of a fight on this). Whether this amounts to a preliminary phase of globalization or not, however, can certainly be debated. It’s a question of assessing the magnitude of change and the extent of connections to what would happen subsequently. Is there a direct link between the emergence of new networks and contemporary globalization? Or are the really powerful shaping factors of more recent vintage? Many of the negatives are obvious. The trans-regional connections that were surging by 1000 CE were Afro-Eurasian, not global at all. The isolation of the Americas and Pacific Oceania was the huge exception to any claim of early globalization, but there were also parts of sub-Saharan Africa that were uninvolved. The full geography of globalization had yet to be established. Even in the Afro-Eurasian network, the times involved in effective contact were massive by contemporary standards – months, literally, instead of days to get from one end to another. This in turn limited the impact and intensity of interaction. We have seen how long it took even for obviously effective new products, like paper, to spread from one society to the next. Speed was increasing, but there were no dramatic breakthroughs yet. The technology of contact, most obviously, had yet to be revolutionized. Significant interactions involved new commercial methods and impressive interest in acquiring new knowledge; globalization did not depend on technology alone. Still the lack of decisive new machines, despite significant gains in navigation and shipbuilding, is striking. The range of interaction was also limited, partly because of the time-of-travel factors, partly because of cultural or other traditional barriers. There was very little interregional political influence. As we have seen, efforts to copy neighbors in the area of political institutions did not prove viable, and nothing like international political standards emerged at all (save to the extent that, within major religious zones like that of Islam, larger religious criteria transcended the purely local). With rare exceptions – Japan’s partial imitation of China’s social patterns was one example, interactions were not yet intense enough to have much impact on gender standards or other basic social forms. While the consequences of contacts were expanding – as in the explicit exchange of manufacturing techniques – the interregional process overall revolved more exclusively around trade than would prove to be the case with later phases of globalization.

62  Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE Regional involvement in the network of exchange, not surprisingly, phased in and out. As we will see, oscillations between engagement and disengagement have persisted in reactions to globalization even in recent decades, but the pattern was vivid in the aftermath of the new connections that developed around 1000 CE. Japanese retreat from the most ardent imitation of China after a few centuries has already been noted. Enthusiasm cooled still further in the 13th century, when China (but not Japan) was invaded by the Mongols, which made Japanese leaders feel that had surpassed their now-vulnerable mentor. Interest not just in imitation but even in active trade outreach declined. For quite different reasons, as the Byzantine Empire decayed by the 14th century, Russian connections with the wider world also diminished. Oscillations of this sort also qualify the idea of a compelling network, despite the important changes involved. On the other hand, the strides toward more regular, wide-ranging, and meaningful connections were considerable. Later phases of globalization depended substantially on the innovations generated in this early stage, from the specific changes in navigational capacity or trade routes to less tangible shifts like the new sense of excitement now associated with travel and with travel stories. Particularly important were new dependencies and motivations associated with trans-regional exchange, along with the expanding realization of what might be learned through foreign imitation. A growing number of people really craved goods, like sugar, only available in many regions through imports. Urgent tastes of this sort could even motivate foreign policy, as when Spain and Portugal reached out to seize South Atlantic island groups like the Canaries in part, ultimately, for their potential role in expanding sugar production. (And by the 14th century, they were even importing African slaves to provide labor on the new plantations, another sign of how new tastes, translated into consumer demand for imports, could drive huge changes in distant human lives.) Merchants in many societies gained a durable stake in interregional trade, another steady force for additional connections in the future. Motivation and dependency, in turn, explain the creation of additional systems of trans-regional contact in the centuries after 1000 CE, particularly as Arab political vitality and leadership began to decline. Not only did new merchant groups, like Muslim Indians and to a more limited extent Swahili merchants from Africa, pour into established trade routes. China began to accelerate its seagoing activities in the coastal Pacific and Indian oceans, with their pioneering big ships. Trans-regional contacts, in other words, did not depend on any one system after 1000 CE, even though the Arabs long took the lead. This first phase of globalization clearly increased the range of regions involved in contact; established the basis for regular interregional trade – a process that would expand, but never had to be reinvented; and extended the motivations of various global players, from merchants to adventurers to elite consumers, who would want to sustain a multi-regional framework. Along with all this a

The Birth of Globalization?  63 more regular, though limited, the process of exchanging techniques and ideas was beginning to emerge as well. For many of the societies involved, these developments were enhanced, briefly but decisively, by the new framework for exchange unexpectedly provided by the Mongol conquests of the 14th century. Further Readings K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1985); Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250 to 1350 (New York, 1989); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, CA, 1998); Abdul Sheriff and Enseng Ho, The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Societies (Oxford, 2014); Pius Malekandathi, Maritime India: Trade, Religion and Philosophy in the Indian Ocean (London, 2014); John Chaffee, The Muslim Merchants of Premodern China (Cambridge, 2018); Yan Chen, Maritime Silk Route and ChineseForeign Cultural Exchanges (Beijing, 2002); George Fr. Hourani and John Carswell, Arab Seafaring: In the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times (Princeton, NJ, 1995); Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1986). Alan Gurney, Compass: A Story of Exploration and Innovation (London, 2004); Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand Year History (Cambridge, MA, 1991). Jonathan Bloom, Paper before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven, CT, 2001); Maya Schatzmiller, “The Adoption of Paper in the Middle East, 700-1300,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61 (2018). Mehdi Nakosteen, History of Islamic Origins of Western Education (Bethesda, MD, 1984); Emily Greble, Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe (Oxford, 2021); W.M. Wett, The Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe (Edinburgh, 2004); Diana Darla, Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe (London, 2020).

4

Transition The Mongol Period

While the basic framework for new patterns of exchange in the centuries around 1000 CE was established by Arab traders and others, including the growing array of travelers and missionaries, an unexpected development soon after 1200 extended the framework in important ways, that would also help lead to the next phase of globalization. A new, interlocking Mongol empire began to be established that accelerated connections among major parts of Asia and Europe, creating new opportunities and new hesitations around the issue of contact that would have an impact long after the Mongol period itself. Early in the 13th century the Mongols, a nomadic herding people from Central Asia began pushing into China. This launched a decades-long process of expansion that would bring conquests not only into all of China but also into Russia, the rest of Central Asia, and the eastern portion of the Middle East, plus important pressure on Japan and east-central Europe. Mongol conquests almost certainly constituted the biggest event in world history to that point, simply because they covered such a large area. Fitting the Mongol conquest into the history of globalization raises some interesting challenges. On the one hand, the Mongol period unquestionably accelerated exchange, particularly in creating relatively safe conditions for land travel from Persia to China. Mongol rulers in fact often issued safe passages to merchants and others, to facilitate their ventures. Opportunities for trade and, even more, for technology exchange expanded; it was also in the Mongol period that famous travelers like Marco Polo were able to operate, and that the bubonic plague spread out from China, inadvertently carried in part by Mongol troops operating in the Middle East. On the other hand, the Mongol period was short-lived. It did not establish a durable new framework for globalization (nor did a brief Chinese replacement effort that followed). The Mongol impact did however alter regional patterns of participation in early globalization, affecting China, Russia, and Western Europe most obviously, and this would have longlasting consequences. Initial Mongol conquests had nothing to do with global aspirations. A military genius, Chinggis Khan, won leadership of this nomadic people early in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003439615-6

Transition  65 13th century, and set out to conquer China. Nomadic interest in attacking Chinese holdings was not new, though Chinggis Khan had his own particular set of ambitions. It is possible that, thanks to a brief warming period in central Asia, an increase in grasses contributed to a greater supply of horses, that would in turn facilitate nomadic conquest. But again, the process began with no lofty global goals: it was a raid for booty and territory. It turned out, however, that the Mongols were able to conquer a great deal of territory very quickly. Chinggis Khan launched his attacks on China in 1215, and while the whole of Chinese territory was captured only a few decades later amid bitter fighting, the process advanced steadily. All of northern China was seized just a few years after Chinggis Khan’s death in 1227. In the meantime, other Mongol conquerors fanned out in Russia, which was taken over between 1236 and 1240; another group pressed further into Central Asia, capturing key cities along the old Silk Road; and yet another wave invaded the eastern Middle East, winning Baghdad in 1258 and definitively ending the Arab caliphate after a century or more of Arab decline. By this point, Mongol cavalry techniques were supplemented by use of explosive powder picked up from the Chinese. There were of course limits. Efforts to invade southeast Asia did not get very far. Two attempts to conquer Japan failed. While Mongols raided Poland and Hungary to the west of Russia, causing considerable damage, they did not stay to consolidate their gains. And an Egyptian force successfully blocked them from moving into the western Middle East and North Africa. Still, by the later 13th century the Mongols ruled a vast stretch of territory, from western Russia to the Pacific coast of China, from Russia to Persia, in four interlocking units called Khanates. Further, beyond their capacity for conquest, Mongol rulers, though brutal in war, proved to be exceptionally tolerant leaders, active in promoting trade and artisanal manufacturing and delighted to use officials and entertain visitors from a variety of backgrounds. Chinggis Khan himself eagerly invited philosophers and religious scholars from various parts of Eurasia to visit his new capital in Karakorum and debate the merits and drawbacks of different belief systems (though he remained a polytheist). In addition, the Mongol rulers effectively secured orderly trade routes throughout their domains. As a Muslim historian noted, the peoples within this empire “enjoyed such a peace that a man might have journeyed from the land of sunrise to the land of sunset with a golden platter upon his head without suffering the least violence from anyone.” In China, the leading Mongol ruler, Kublai Khan, in control in the later 13th century, maintained the traditions of tolerance, while seeking to assure respect for Confucian beliefs. The combination of vast domains, good order, and openness to a variety of people and ideas made the Mongol era a crucial accelerator for a variety of interregional contacts. Most obviously, an array of West Europeans eagerly made their way into Mongol lands – some seeking work (this is when even some actors ventured to China, looking for jobs), some seeking opportunities for trade,

66  Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE some – like the few emissaries sent from the Pope – eager to promote religious conversions. Marco Polo and his uncles were among the crowd of new travelers. While the visitors had relatively little durable impact on China itself, they played a vital role in furthering the knowledge of Chinese products and inventions back home. Greater awareness of the range and value of Asian products joined with new technologies that might facilitate further contact. By creating a period of European–East Asian interaction, unprecedented to that point, the Mongols provided both motives and means for further connections. It was no accident that just a century after the Mongol era a European explorer, Christopher Columbus, would set out to find a more direct route to Asia. Most important was the technology transfer that began to accelerate during the Mongol period itself, at a point when West Europe leaders were more eager and better able to take advantage of borrowed innovations than ever before. Explosive powder headed the list. China had been using explosives by the 12th century, and the Mongols picked up the technology a century later, employing it in their own attacks on Chinese cities. One observer described the result: “the noise was like a tremendous thundering, shaking the walls and ground… the entire population was terrified.” By 1300, either the Chinese or the Mongols were using what was initially called a “hand cannon” – a gun – for the first time. And both European and Middle Eastern armies were beginning to incorporate guns and cannon into their arsenals soon after that point – a permanent change in military capacity. Guns were not the only relevant technology, however. The Mongol period of exchange also enabled Europeans to learn about printing (a Korean-Chinese innovation), adding adaptations by the middle of the 15th century. Knowledge of playing cards was another transfer. Mongols themselves, though not great traders, took full advantage of the many products that were available through existing networks. Thus, Mongol officials in China enjoyed displaying ornate feathers imported from east Africa. Exports of Indian printed cotton cloth continued to find favor in various parts of Europe and Asia, including Japan. Increased prosperity in key parts of Asia, conveyed to Western audiences by travelers’ accounts, enhanced the interest in further contact. The Mongol impact was diverse, however. Though the new rulers carefully encouraged Chinese manufacturing and trade, they were not popular in China, and by the later 14th century a series of bloody wars began to push them out. Russia, while not deeply oppressed by the Mongols, had not benefited greatly, and the question of how Russians would relate to other parts of the world would have to be taken up again after they began to regain independence in the 15th century. The Mongol conquest, combined with the decline of Russia’s traditional partner, the Byzantine Empire, disrupted previous Russian contact patterns. Japanese leaders, for their part, were convinced that their country must be special, given the fact they had kept the Mongols at bay while their Chinese

Transition  67 mentors had fallen victim. Their interest in external contacts, already fading, was further diminished. And although Mongols had on the whole favored Islam, many Muslims regarded their conquests, particularly in the Middle East, as fearsome setbacks – as one chronicler put it, “a disaster such as no people had experienced before.” Actual Mongol presence in the Middle East was fairly short-lived, but the Arab caliphate and political unity in the region were gone for good. Finally, of course, some key areas were not affected directly at all, for better or worse. Africa, most obviously, was too distant from the Mongols to experience any serious impact, including gaining an opportunity to learn of some of the new technologies that so intrigued the Europeans. Trade patterns in the Indian Ocean continued without major disruption. The Mongol period had clearly ended by the later 14th century, though Russia regained independence only a few decades later. With renewed divisions in Asia and eastern Europe, overland travel became more dangerous once again, returning attention to seaborn trade. Again, the results of Mongol contacts would prove long-lasting, but the framework itself disappeared. Briefly, once their own independence was regained, the Chinese experimented with an alternative system. During the first decades of the 15th century, the government organized a series of great expeditions into and through the Indian ocean, commanded by a Muslim Chinese admiral. Using the huge Chinese junks, fleets visited Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, all the way to the east coast of Africa, where many Chinese coins from the period have been found. The goal was to assert China’s regional power, seeking tribute payments from other governments, and perhaps to promote trade. But the new ruling dynasty, the Ming, reversed course and decided against this policy in 1433, citing expense and eager to invest more in a new capital city and in the massive, upgraded version of the Great Wall – against possible renewed attacks from the north or west. China’s role in the global economy would remain high, but its direct commercial involvement receded. Without generating a full new phase of globalization, partly because of the relatively short time period involved, the Mongol episode arguably had two enduring effects: the introduction of the new military technology and the shift in regional involvements. Guns would play a major role in the next stage of globalization, opening up around 1500, and in global interactions thereafter, making military capacity a more important component in globalization than had been the case in the early phase. On the regional side, reactions to the Mongols encouraged greater focus on internal development, over external contacts, in Japan and ultimately China; cemented a reduction in the Arab role; while encouraging new levels of interest and capacity in Western Europe. In both respects – the military and the regional, the Mongol era, brief but vibrant, would prove to be a crucial link between the patterns of early globalization generated in the centuries around 1000 CE and the next stage, as it began to emerge 500 years later.

68  Early Globalization, 1000–1450 CE Further Readings Thomas T. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (Cambridge, 2001); Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410 (2nd ed., New York, 2018); David Morgan, The Mongols (2nd ed., Oxford, 2007); Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (New York, 2004). Martin Stuart-Fox, A Short History of China and Southeast Asia: Tribute, Trade and Influence (London, 2003); Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas (New York, 1994). Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton, 2016).

Part III

Protoglobalization

A number of developments, beginning around 1500, generated a decisive new level of globalization – clearly different from early globalization though building upon it. Relevant geography, technology, regional power balance, and the content of major exchanges all changed significantly. At the same time, the result was not yet the kind of globalization that would emerge in the industrial age. Thus while a case can be made that 1500 is a viable date for the start of globalization itself, many scholars use terms like “protoglobalization” or “early modern globalization” to characterize this phase – to designate a more extensive global framework but one that is not yet quite the full deal. A number of historians have explored the protoglobalization concept. Some, like A.G. Hopkins, have also worked on early globalization, so they are quite comfortable in seeing globalization emerging in a series of stages, with protoglobalization stage number two. Some other historians see no particular merit in the archaic globalization concept, but do agree that some important developments began to emerge after 1500. Wolf Schaefer, for example, one of the “new global history” group, believes that full globalization is a recent phenomenon, taking shape after 1945. But he grants that the acceleration of global contacts after 1500 was an important first step; the protoglobal term and concept fit his notion of a preliminary phase quite well. Historian Robbie Robertson, who sees “three waves” of globalization, similarly uses 1500 as the onset of the first wave: Human societies experienced a fundamental change in their interconnections. Previously isolated communities found themselves dangerously exposed to new global forces. Many societies were transformed by the experience. Many people did not survive. Robertson goes on to a fairly familiar list of early modern developments, not particularly focused on global structures, but at least he recognizes an early modern turning point. A protoglobal phase makes sense, in other words, both to historians who emphasize an earlier stage, and to some who see the whole process starting in the 16th century. DOI: 10.4324/9781003439615-7

70 Protoglobalization There is still another group that downplays protoglobalization entirely, in favor of a later start: Osterhammel and Peterson, for example, though mentioning Islam, the Mongols, and the European expeditions to the Americas, launch their account of globalization with developments around 1750. Before this, in their view, regional societies still remained largely isolated, not yet really converging as they would begin to do in the middle of the 18th century. So there is room for debate but considerable interest in defining a relevant globalization stage that accommodates some of the big changes of the early modern period. The following two chapters – Chapter 5 on the main patterns from 1500 onward, Chapter 6 on some important extensions in the 18th century – explore the protoglobalization phase from three standpoints. First, and most obviously, the chapters deal with major changes in the global framework, which justify the notion of a new stage. Second, however, they also note important continuities from early globalization: not everything was newly minted, since important global developments had already occurred. Third, the chapters make the limitations of protoglobalization clear as well – the differences between this important phase and what would occur later on, particularly under the impact of the industrial revolution. All three of these arguments – change, considerable continuity, and limitation – are essential in understanding the nature and significance of the protoglobal phase. Change is the easiest target in the chapters that follow. The most obvious innovation involved in protoglobalization was the extension of contacts to embrace the whole world, and not just Afro-Eurasia. The inclusion of the Americas accelerated the range and volume of world exchange from the early 16th century onward, and by the 18th century, Pacific Oceania would begin to be included as well. Correspondingly, emphasis on commodity production – sugar, furs, and grains – began to overshadow the emphasis on luxury goods. Protoglobalization took shape amid the growing global power of a number of countries in Western Europe. Other regions played vital roles as well; the European position must not be overemphasized. But there is no question that the leadership in global connections passed from Asia to Europe during this globalization phase. Not coincidentally, protoglobalization involved more extensive assertions of military power than early globalization had entailed, with the growing use of artillery. Militarization of the seas was a particularly fundamental feature that had been largely absent previously. Along with the new European role and greater reliance on military force, protoglobalization introduced starker regional inequalities than had existed in the early globalization phase, particularly for some of the regions newly introduced to globalization such as South America and Central Africa. Other innovations highlight new shipping technologies and new forms of organization. Indeed, each phase of globalization has its own distinctive characteristics in these areas, and protoglobalizaiton is no exception. Emphasis on change, however, should not totally overshadow attention to continuities – unless the early phase of globalization is dismissed as a mere

Protoglobalization 71 backdrop. Indian Ocean trade remained vital in protoglobalization, though the growing use of the Atlantic modified this somewhat. China continued to be a manufacturing powerhouse, indeed expanding its role. Production and sale of porcelain expanded so rapidly that, in English, the word “china” was introduced in the 17th century to describe the whole category. India’s manufacturing role also remained substantial, at least until the later 18th century. East African trade along the Swahili coast, though touched by European interference, continued without major disruption. Even the use of guns, though greatly expanding, had been prepared by developments in the earlier period; and shipping and navigation technology, though altered, continued to rely heavily on earlier innovations. Finally, many of the key motivations for globalization also carried over, most obviously in the merchants’ quest for profit but also in the excitement of venturing into new lands. Not every aspect of globalization was being reinvented. At the same time, however, protoglobalization, even as it expanded into the 18th century, had important constraints compared with what would come later. Shipping improved, but shipping times and volumes remained limited if compared to subsequent standards. Whole regions could and did opt out of protoglobalization, preferring internal development – another choice that would become far more complicated later on. Though some types of cultural exchange accelerated during the protoglobal phase, this was not in fact a major emphasis; even some regions that participated in global trade showed little interest in cultural imports. Revealingly, there was little change in basic religious affiliations in Asia or Eastern Europe during this period, except for Christian conversion in the Philippines; the thrust of new contacts did not extend this deeply. Overall, global connections clearly increased in the early modern centuries, building on but surpassing prior levels; but there were some revealing limitations as well. Further Readings Wolf Schaefer, “How to Approach Global Present, Local Pasts, and the Canon of the Globe,” in S.W. Hewa and D.H. Stapleton, eds., Globalization, Philanthropy, and Civil Society: Toward a New Political Culture in the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2005) and “Global History,” in Roland Robertson and Jan Aart Scholte, eds., Encyclopedia of Globalization (v.2, New York, 2007); Geoffrey Gunn, First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 1500-1800 (Lanham, MD, 2003); A.G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (New York, 2003); C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World: Global Connections and Comparisons, 1780–1914 (Malden, MA, 2004); Juergen Osterhammel and Nels Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton, NJ, 2005); Robbie Robertson, The Three Waves of Globalization: A History of Developing Global Consciousness (London, 2002).

5

The Main Features of Protoglobalization, 1500–1750

Developments around 1500, and the exchange systems that resulted, clearly moved the world closer to full globalization. The inclusion of the Americas in patterns of contact and, soon, the first definitely recorded trip across the Pacific, created the possibility of growing links to virtually every major society in the world. Pockets of isolation remained. Australia and New Zealand were not fully brought into the picture until the 18th century, and well after that small clusters of hunting and gathering tribes in remote spots were untouched by even tentative contact. But complete isolation was now the exception, and many regions became more substantially involved with exchanges of goods, people, and diseases than ever before. The new global geography was only part of the change, however. The intensity and consequences of connections shifted. Precisely because exchanges had more intrusive implications, some societies consciously decided to limit their involvement – a backhanded testimony to the fact that contacts now raised new kinds of identity issues compared with the more casual patterns of the previous phase. The new types of inequality that arose within the global system – a distinction between winners and losers in globalization – would become durable staples, at least to some extent, from the 1500s to the present day. In several respects, then, the meaning of global connections began to take on new contours. As happened after 1000 CE, momentum would continue after 1500, leading to additional changes, particularly by the 18th century, that further enhanced global activities. In this chapter, focusing on the reasons to identify this next phase of globalization in developments that began in the 1500s, we deal with the huge implications of the changes in global geography – the inclusion of the Americas, and what this led to in terms of the further globalization of human basics like diseases and foods. Here, along with the later opening of the Pacific Ocean and its territories, was a massive expansion of new contact routes, a theme already visible on a smaller trans-regional scale in the previous phase. We deal with shifts in globally relevant technologies, though again without overdoing claims about dramatic breakthroughs. New forms of weaponry, most obviously, facilitated DOI: 10.4324/9781003439615-8

74 Protoglobalization forcible entry of some societies into others, but there were also some changes in transportation and communication that furthered the process of interconnection. Crucial new global institutions took shape, most notably new business organizations capable of bridging among distant societies in new ways. The consequences of these various changes included innovations in migration patterns and the mixing of peoples and the new or at least much more visible pattern of global inequality, which became part of the exchange process from this point until the present day. Production levels and consumer tastes were further reshaped by exchange, another familiar theme now given new dimensions; food options globalized, with the mixing of Old and New World staples. However, there were also limitations to the power of global change. Different regions participated differentially – indeed there was more conscious resistance than in the earlier phase, a sign that there was more to lose from heightened contact but also, still, ample opportunity to decide not to join in. Attention to regional variation requires explicit analysis. One of the most obvious developments during the decades after 1500 shows some of the complexities of the new contact patterns in this period. Around 1000, as we have seen, great religions, headed by Islam, had fanned out over large areas, showing the power to disseminate common basic cultures more widely than ever before; but at the same time the resulting religious map introduced new divisions in humankind based on religious preference. After 1500, the capacity of several societies – first Spain and Portugal, then France, Holland, and Britain – to set up and operate overseas colonies at great distances from the home country demonstrated new organizational strengths directly relevant to advancing globalization. Bureaucrats could be sent out, rules established, and records kept from European centers to American or Asian colonies as never before, defying earlier regional separation. To be sure, most of the colonies were fairly loosely organized, with substantial dependence on negotiations with local leaders – particularly in Africa or Asia – but the ability even to project political and business connections over these distances had no precedent in world history. Yet the colonial systems, like the world religions, divided as well as connected. European colonial powers fiercely rivaled each other; the common fact of colonial control faded before the battles among England and Spain, France and England. Colonies also introduced new and deep divisions between colonizers and colonized that would complicate global relationships through the later 20th century and that echo still today. New global capacities and new global battle lines, in other words, emerged simultaneously. Finally, it is vital to recognize that expanding trade and the new contacts with the Americas, though decisively important, were not the only game in town. Several new Islamic empires arose in the Middle East in this period, including the Ottomans and the Mughals; Russia also launched its long process of territorial expansion. In eastern and southern Africa, a number of new kingdoms

The Main Features of Protoglobalization, 1500–1750  75 formed, only modestly influenced by outside forces though maintaining many traditional ties with the Middle East. Technology Guns, and particularly naval cannon, played a major role in underpinning the new patterns of global contact. Force had helped shape trans-regional exchanges previously, but for the most part in a subordinate way. Arab armies, pushing across North Africa and into Spain, and through central Asia to western China, had helped establish key contact patterns before 1000 CE. Later, the great Chinese expeditions of the 15th century generated some skirmishes as part of the effort to win tribute from societies around the Indian Ocean. With gun-based military technology, however, force became more prominent in shaping global relationships. The new technology depended on the previous Chinese invention of explosive powder and European improvements in the metal casting through which this powder could launch projectiles over considerable distances and with some accuracy – guns, in short. The combination was ready to go by 1500. When Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, rounded Africa and reached India in 1498–9, signaling Portuguese entry into established patterns of Indian Ocean commerce, he actually had little to offer his Asian counterparts: the European goods he brought drew scant interest. The main result of his voyage was the evidence he could provide of opportunities for Portugal to gain direct involvement in the cherished spice trade. But when da Gama returned to India on a second trip, and as Portugal organized an Indian Ocean fleet under its aggressive admiral, Alfonso d’Albuquerque, gun ships began to produce the edge that mere trade offers could not provide. Heavily-armed Portuguese vessels, bombarding ports and local shipping alike, gained Portugal several trading bases on the Indian coast and intimidated other merchants, some of whom began to pay Portugal a tribute tax in order to continue their seaborne trade. D’Albuquerque, to be sure, supplemented guns with less technological coercion, executing or cutting off the hands of sailors who defied Portuguese control. But it was European gunnery, steadily improved from 1500 onward, that allowed Europeans to acquire a substantial share in global trade and facilitated additional connections, including of course the inclusion of the Americas. As C.A. Bayly has put it, “Europeans became much better at killing people” – and their edge expanded steadily over several centuries. Guns were a core part of the military package that allowed Europeans to gain an upper hand in the Americas and the Caribbean, often with relatively little resistance. Hernando Cortés, for example, the Spanish conqueror of Mexico early in the 16th century, while eager to negotiate with native Americans peacefully, noted the impact of the “discharge of our guns” when resistance was offered. In turn, an Aztec observer, present when Cortés ordered a “great cannon” to be

76 Protoglobalization fired off, noted that “the messengers lost their senses and fainted away.” They later told the Aztec ruler how a thing like a ball of stone comes out from its entrails; it comes out shooting sparks and raining fire …. If it is aimed against a tree, it shatters the tree into splinters. This is a most unnatural sight, as if the tree had exploded from within. Motecuhzoma, hearing this account, reportedly was “filled with terror. It was as if his heart had fainted, as if it had shriveled. It was as if he were conquered by despair.” With guns, in other words, Europe not only crashed the global party but helped redefine its dimensions. Guns were not the only new technology that reshaped patterns of contact. The capacity to cross the Atlantic and, soon, the Pacific on a regular basis required improvements in shipbuilding, though it also relied on the navigational devices and innovations that had developed in the previous period. The fact that an individual crew could circumnavigate the globe, led by Ferdinand Magellan (completed under Juan Sebastian del Cano after Filipinos killed Magellan), 1519–22, was a technological triumph as well as a demonstration of a new level of human daring. Increasing the size and versatility of ocean-going ships was a key gain, as well as doing away with the need for oarsmen. Ironically, Europeans would not introduce some of the advances the Chinese had made, notably the provision of water-tight inner compartments, until the 19th century; and they never matched the size of the largest junks until that point. But European ship designers did build on other Chinese and particularly Arab models to launch types of vessels that were superior in many respects. By 1500, European ships, though small compared with the great Chinese junks, had improved their maneuverability thanks to the use of both square and triangular, or lateen, sails. The mixture allowed them to pick up winds from almost any direction, which in turn was vital to the ability to develop new sea routes. Square sails remained essential for taking full advantage of tail winds, but they were fairly useless in crosswinds; this is where the lateen sails came in, allowing use of winds from the sides. Portuguese and other European manuals on shipbuilding improved steadily, which obviously both summarized existing gains and encouraged further developments. Not only European but also Indian and Southeast Asian shipyards served the ocean-going vessels of the period. European access to some of the rot- and insect-resistant woods available in tropical Asia also played a role in the steady if undramatic gains in ships’ performance. Other improvements from the later 15th century onward involved modifications of hull design, again with the goal of producing ships capable of sailing in mid-ocean well away from land. Famous vessel categories such as the Spanish galleon were defined by particular types of hulls as well as the configuration of

The Main Features of Protoglobalization, 1500–1750  77 sails. Gradually, design changes facilitated larger cargoes. During the 18th century, for example, the carrying capacity of Dutch ships plying the Indian Ocean increased by 25 percent. Further improvements in navigational devices were also crucial, though almost all of them utilized the basic inventions previously adapted from the Chinese and the Arabs. Capacities in navigation changed rapidly in the decades after 1500 as more and more seagoing voyages operated for weeks, sometimes even months, without the ability to determine directions by sighting land. Improvements in measurements of latitude – distances north or south of the equator – were particularly important. Navigators learned to calculate not only the direction of a ship but also its speed and the speeds of ocean currents and winds, to deduce latitude in a procedure called dead reckoning. Globes and improved maps of the earth assisted this work, as sea charts showing parallels of latitude became widely available. Equipment such as astrolabes and quadrants were further adapted. A new kind of cross-staff, used to locate directional stars and then translate this determination into degrees of latitude, had developed from the older Arab kamal. Novel devices also allowed calculations to be made from the sun, with smoked glass inserted to prevent the navigator from blinding himself. Astronomical charts, kept rigorously confidential by ships’ captains, calculated heights of the sun above the equator at noon for every day of the year. The compass remained fundamental; Christopher Columbus noted that it “always seeks the truth.” Sixteenth-century compasses involved a large magnetized needle fastened to the underside of a directional card, with the needle swinging freely on a brass pin. The whole apparatus was carefully kept level through the use of mounting rings. Local variations in magnetic field that might produce errors in the compass were increasingly charted by the 16th century, with new instruments available to compensate. Timing mechanisms improved as well, for these were essential in calculating latitudes. Hourglasses, filled with sand, were widely used, and these timers also helped calculate a ship’s speed. Sailors also began more regularly to chart courses and speeds in ship’s logs, which in turn provided data that could be used in more general charts. And of course refinements continued. By the 18th century, the big quest was for the ability to measure longitudes (east–west positions). King Charles II of Britain set up the Royal Observatory in 1675 to solve the problem of finding longitude at sea, and in 1714 the government offered a large prize for methods that would provide accurate determinations. Relying on a new ability to register time more accurately and minutely (with new clocks and then even watches that would keep time with no more than one second’s error per month), a successful device finally emerged in 1768. A three-year voyage of Captain James Cook, 1772–5, which ranged the Pacific from the tropics to the Antarctic, would have been impossible without the new ability to gauge longitudinal position, with

78 Protoglobalization Cook referring to the new watches as “our faithful guide through all the vicissitudes of climates.” The various developments in transportation technology, both ship design and navigational improvements, did not directly do much to increase the speed of transportation, and this was a huge limitation in the framework for advances in globalization after 1500. They did, however, greatly increase the areas that could be reached by sea – and this could have some indirect effects even on speed. It has been estimated that sea routes extended almost 45 percent farther by the 1500s than they had in 1000 CE – a massive advance and probably the greatest increase over any 500-year span to that date. For the first time, indeed, sea routes began greatly to surpass land routes in terms of service as major arteries of trade. And while oceanic shipping was still a dangerous pastime, safety did improve particularly with the capacity to assess longitude. New routes took shape. A direct result of technological change, plus growing experience, involved new abilities to move into previously uncharted territories. Europeans, headed by the Portuguese, learned that going out greater distances at sea – for example, in the Atlantic Ocean – though counterintuitive, would allow ships to pick up new directional winds that would allow greater mobility in the long run. The Portuguese had no trouble sailing to the Canary Islands in the South Atlantic because trade winds blew from the northeast, but getting back to Europe was a huge problem. Instead of trying to force their way against the trade winds, Portuguese ships by the mid-15th century went farther out into the Atlantic until they could pick up westerlies that would move them back to Europe directly. Similar principles were used to get from Portugal around the southern tip of Africa, and the pattern would soon be applied to other parts of the world as well. Speed, though not revolutionized, was affected along with flexibility. While there was no basic change in the pace of ships in the Indian Ocean, new navigational devices, plus greater experience and greater daring, allowed sailors to use lower latitudes – the 40s or the 50s – to move more directly from Africa to southeast Asia, because the winds were steadier at these levels precisely because there were no intervening land masses. There were greater risks of shipwreck as well, but for many the shorter travel time was well worth the gamble. The most obvious technological emphasis in the period, beyond the new levels of force available, involved transportation rather than communication, because enhanced trading capacity was the obvious immediate goal. Yet the most revolutionary single technological development at the outset of the new period, aside from guns, actually rested in the communications field rather than transportation: the invention of more efficient printing presses in Europe, after adaptations from East Asian models. Printing had quick and dramatic effects in Europe itself, in transmitting knowledge and imagery and, fairly soon, helping to upset established patterns of culture by challenging traditions and spreading new ideas. The global impact of the same communications revolution, however,

The Main Features of Protoglobalization, 1500–1750  79 is not so easily established – at the very least, it was considerably more gradual. The new printing technology spread slowly outside Western Europe; books and other printed materials had to be translated if they were to have significant impact beyond a single region; and books themselves were heavy, hardly conducive to speed in communication. Yet printing did feed into this preliminary phase of globalization in several ways, although without the revolutionary impact it had in Europe itself. Colonies of Europeans, most notably in North and South America, did establish printing operations by the 17th and 18th centuries and certainly served as markets for books initially printed in Europe. An intellectual community arose by the late 17th century, interested in the same kinds of novels (a new art form in the West at this point) and scientific information. While trans-regional communities had developed earlier around religious materials, printing expanded the range and helped shift focus toward more secular topics. Furthermore, printing, as we will see, helped international trading companies and also colonial governments promulgate rules and guidelines for subordinates in distance places. More standardized information could be disseminated than ever before. Finally, as additional regions became aware of European developments, particularly in science and technology, they began to seek access to printed materials themselves. Russian Westernization, for example, involved a whole class of Russian aristocrats trained in French and thereby easily able to participate in larger scientific discussions. New edicts in Japan, in the 18th century, encouraged translation of Western scientific and medical books into Japanese. Printing, in other words, might combine with acquisition of literacy in other languages or with translation services to facilitate the dissemination of various kinds of knowledge across established political and cultural boundaries. Not, again, a communications revolution yet, but a significant development that built new kinds of trans-regional contacts. Global Inclusion: The Americas and Pacific Oceania Changing transportation technologies were directly involved in the most obviously revolutionary development in trans-regional contacts after 1500: the inclusion of the Americas and, more gradually, Pacific Oceania in routine global exchange. Quite quickly after Columbus’ confused voyage of 1492, where he long thought he had found a new direct route to Asia, Europeans mounted a growing series of voyages to various parts of the Caribbean and the Americas, linking not only Europe but Africa as well. Existing experience in sailing to key South Atlantic island groups, like the Canaries, helped explain why Europeans extended so rapidly. During the 16th century not only South America but also North America including the farther reaches of eastern Canada became routine stomping grounds for European explorers, traders, and growing handfuls of colonists. Quickly as well, a new slave trade from Africa crossed the

80 Protoglobalization Atlantic to fill growing labor needs – a hideous traffic in human beings, over unprecedented distances, that would ultimately mount to well over 10 million individuals. While the Americas were most obviously transformed by this new contact network, virtually every part of Afro-Eurasia was affected to some degree as well. Utilization of the Pacific developed more slowly. In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese seaman but sailing under the Spanish flag, rounded the southern tip of South America to launch into the Pacific – which the Spanish had discovered by marching across Panama a few years before. Magellan believed that Asia lay just beyond the Americas and hoped to accomplish what Columbus had not managed. Instead, he let himself and his crew in for an arduous trip, far longer than he had envisaged. Supplies ran low, so that the company was forced to eat leather softened in sea water while seeking to capture any rats or mice that remained on board. Ultimately, the expedition discovered Guam and then went onto the Philippines; and once there, the leaders sensibly decided that recrossing the Pacific was a truly bad idea and that it would be better to sail into the familiar waters of the Indian Ocean instead. Quite rapidly after this, the Spanish began to establish regular exchanges across the Pacific from Mexico to the Philippines, where they brought American silver as well as seeds or tubers from several American crops. But full exploration of the vast Pacific developed only over a longer period, with British and French adventurers taking a leading role by the 18th century. It was only at this point that additional island groups, like Hawaii, became seriously involved in trans-regional contacts, and that the northwest coast of North America was drawn in. Australia and New Zealand linked in as well after 1750. Still, a major redefinition of the world’s contact map was an established fact soon after 1500, and the further ramifications would merely extend the results. Knowledge of New World geography, and by the 18th century that of places like Australia, advanced apace. Charts of the major new oceanic routes, complete with calculations of currents and winds, were another obvious result, facilitating further exchange and gradually making the voyages more reliable. Expanded shipping, as well as trade opportunities, prompted Europeans to set up trading posts in many places – along the coast of western and southern Africa; in Goa and, later, other ports in India; in Macao, a new Portuguese colony on the Chinese coast that the Chinese tolerated as a principal exchange point with Western merchants. The Dutch post at the tip of southern Africa (where the Portuguese had earlier tried but failed to get a foothold) shows the potential ramifications. Established in the 17th century to provide a chance for ships to take on food and water in the long trip between the Netherlands and the Indian Ocean, the post quickly needed additional labor. Officials sought good relations with local Africans as sources of exchange, so did not want to seize slaves directly, and therefore they imported tens of thousands of slaves from southeast Asia – deeply affecting yet another part of the world.

The Main Features of Protoglobalization, 1500–1750  81 More broadly still, the sense of what the world was expanded as well, particularly among Europeans. Most important, the inclusion of the Americas, and then Oceania, had concrete results that both confirmed and increased the importance of now literally global contacts. Trade, already a crucial sinew of trans-regional exchange, gained new significance thanks to the products now available from the Americas. Diseases took on new global dimensions, with crucial impacts as well on migration patterns; and an unprecedented global food experience emerged too. Global Consequences: Trade, Diseases, Migrations, Foods, and Environments Trade

Expanded trade, and trade impact, was an obvious concomitant of altered geography. American production of silver, organized by the Spanish, quickly fed commerce particularly between Western Europe and Asia, as the Europeans used the valued commodity to pay for goods that were otherwise out of their reach because of balance of payments issues. China, particularly, eagerly imported silver, accelerating output of porcelain, tea, and other export items in the process. Peasants expanded silk production, destroying forests in favor of plantations of mulberry trees to feed silk worms. Silver became so common that the country shifted to payments in silver even for ordinary taxes by the 17th century, putting greater pressure on peasants to produce more for the market so that they could earn money for payment, and in general increasing commercialism and also social inequality throughout the empire. Here was a clear instance of how new global trade impacted internal economies, with obviously mixed results. By the 17th century, more Mexican pesos circulated in China than in Mexico proper because of their defined silver content: European traders used the coins to pay for cherished Chinese exports which they otherwise could not have afforded. Growing trade through the Philippines, which was one of the centers where Chinese merchants exchanged silk and porcelain with the Europeans, encouraged urban growth and generated large colonies of foreign businessmen in this island group. Expanding spice production prompted Southeast Asians to reduce forest acreage. Indian manufacturing also increased in response to European buyers with silver in hand, as well as supplying growing markets in other parts of the world. Indian production and export of cotton cloth relied on a growing number of skilled artisans, and played a major role in world trade into the 18th and 19th centuries, even when the goods were carried by the European merchant companies. One study for example, though with some exaggeration, claims that India “clothed the world” during this period of globalization. A bit more gradually, global trade growth affected European conditions as well. Growing popularity of Indian cotton cut into traditional levels of wool production,

82 Protoglobalization but otherwise global trade on the whole stimulated manufacturing. Increasing amounts of wood and iron were essential to supply the merchant fleets and their armaments. Guns and clocks were two manufactured items that Europeans exported in considerable quantity. Profits from world trade and expanding domestic production brought improved living standards to many (though not all) West Europeans, who began to extend their array of home furnishings in response while also enjoying the greater availability of tropical products like pepper and sugar. For the Americas and Eastern Europe, expanding trade focused particularly on a rapid increase in commodities production. From Eastern Europe came grain, furs, and timber; from the Americas, sugar, tobacco, furs. Steady growth in the export of slaves from West Africa highlighted the treatment of human beings as commodities. Not surprisingly, growing dependence on global trade, or at least a growing thirst, prompted military clashes. This was not the first time that trade had motivated war – we have seen earlier examples even in the classical period – but the motivation increased and so, obviously, did geographic scope. Britain and Spain battled for sea supremacy off the coasts of Europe but also in the Americas. Clashes between Britain and Holland and Britain and France had deep roots in the effort to establish global trade advantage. What was essentially the first global war, the Seven Years War in the mid-18th century, pitting Britain against France in North America, the Caribbean, and India, as well as in Europe itself, mixed goals of colonialism and global commerce. Rising international trade also triggered a surge of piracy. Not new – indeed, early globalization had seen some increase – piracy reached its “golden age” in the 16th–18th centuries. Many English pirates preyed on Spanish ships carrying gold and silver; the Caribbean was a particular hotbed. North Africa was another center, with British and even American ships a major target, a significant spur to the development of more effective navies. The heightened global impact of trade was only part of the story. Global patterns of disease were transformed. The Americas and, later, Oceania became enmeshed in biological exchanges with the rest of the world that included germs as well as foods, animals, and human beings. Disease and Migration

Interactions with the Americas quickly generated what is commonly called the “Columbian exchange” – biological exchanges literally around the world. Diseases spread from Europeans and Africans who reached (or were brought to) the New World. Equally important, foods were interchanged, from the Americas to other regions and from Europe and Africa to the Americas. New movements of peoples resulted as well, as the Columbian exchange set a new framework for many different societies – not only in Europe and the Americas but in Africa and Asia as well.

The Main Features of Protoglobalization, 1500–1750  83 There were two phases to the disease story. The dramatic first phase involved the encounter of Native Americans with contagions like measles, typhus, and smallpox for which they had no prior immunity, that were now brought in from Europe and Africa. The result, between 1500 and 1700, was truly awful, in that up to 85 percent of the native population died out. The same pattern occurred in the 18th century in the Pacific territories, though at this point Europeans, eager to seize lands, explicitly encouraged the process in some cases by distributing infected blankets. This first phase of global disease contact led to massive depopulation in the Americas, which opened territories for European settlers and also created the kinds of labor force needs that sustained the unprecedented slave trade from Africa. These new migration patterns, bringing people over great distances in a relatively short span of time, were themselves an innovation in world history, as opposed to the previously dominant pattern of more gradual over-land movements, and began to link migration to this new phase of preliminary globalization. The first disease wave, however, was not the end of the story. Significant and horrible as the mortality results were for the people involved, in the long run a second development was at least as meaningful: because of the new mixing of peoples, by the later 18th century there were no large regions in the world in which this pattern of massive die-offs could ever recur. With the exception of isolated pockets of hunter-gatherers, mostly on remote islands, everyone in the world was now incorporated in the same basic disease pool, with similar resistances and vulnerabilities. What had happened in the disease phase of the Columbian exchange was a massive example of what demographers call a virgin soil epidemic, when a previously separate population is exposed to unfamiliar diseases with high resulting mortality compared with the patterns current among peoples accustomed to the same diseases. By 1800 – three centuries into this new phase of preliminary globalization – the possibility of significant virgin soil epidemics had ended. At the same time, the acceleration of new contacts among peoples, now literally around the world, increased opportunities for contagions that were important though less deadly than the virgin soil encounters. New European interactions with the tropics, both in the Americas and in Africa, brought mosquito-borne diseases, particularly to southern Europe: outbreaks of malaria and yellow fever increased in the 17th and 18th centuries, with significant results. New forms of syphilis spread, either from the Americas or Africa. Interactions between Russia and the Middle East brought epidemics northward. Conflicts with the Ottoman Empire around the Mediterranean promoted periodic incidences of typhus, spreading from one region to another. Europeans did make some progress in the 18th century by imposing new border controls over the movement of people and animals from the Middle East, which reduced certain kinds of contagions. Others cropped up, however. It was in the 19th century that cholera, historically a disease in the Indian subcontinent, began to spread to other regions; seven

84 Protoglobalization major epidemics, from 1832 onward, brought cholera all the way to Europe and, from Europe, to the Americas. In the 20th century, influenza added to the global list, linking various parts of Asia, Europe, and the Americas through contactinspired paths of contagion. The obvious point is that, increasingly, global populations became part of a common pool of diseases and resistances in what can legitimately be seen as a new biological phase of globalization from 1500 onward. Massive die-offs began to disappear thanks to global contact experience, but epidemics, with less dreadful but still significant mortality results, gained new purchase by spreading from one region to another. Here was a new global unity in a very basic sense. Foods

Something of the same global baseline emerged regarding foods. As with diseases, there were important precedents; results of contact had long yielded opportunities to exchange knowledge of basic crops and animals. The addition of the Americas, however, greatly extended the results of this aspect of exchange. For the Americas and Afro-Eurasia, because of long human separation and very different biological experiences, had very different food pools that now, quite quickly in some respects, began to merge. To the Americas came AfroEurasian grains, like wheat, and domesticated animals – the latter vital as new transportation resources as well as food supplies. Populations of cattle, sheep, and horses expanded rapidly in the new environment, and American natives adapted swiftly to some of the new opportunities. Peruvians, for example, partly because of Spanish pressures, quickly adopted the cultivation of grapes and olives, thus picking up two mainstays of the Mediterranean diet while preserving local products as well. Encounters were not always so fruitful, of course. Mexican natives reported that European bread tasted “like dried corn stalks,” and they also disliked the pork fat that delighted Europeans; they long held out for local corn products. Over time, however, some fusion occurred, with native Americans using pork fat as an ingredient of tamales, giving them a lighter texture and greater flavor, while Spaniards in their turn picked up a taste for local beans and chili peppers even as they continued to cherish wheat. Foods from the Americas had an even wider impact than foods brought to the New World. Key American crops, like corn and the potato (including sweet potatoes), offered tremendous caloric advantages to many parts of the world; the same held true for several American varieties of bean. Specialty products like chili peppers and pumpkins might spice diets as well, and a bit later the American tomato would have a huge impact. Ironically, American foods, though carried to different parts of the world by European merchants, long had greater consequences in Asia and Africa than in Europe itself. Columbus, for example, brought corn seeds back from his first trip, but Europeans found corn useful only as porridge and only in cases of

The Main Features of Protoglobalization, 1500–1750  85 famine, and even today regard it primarily as a food for animals – “a more convenient food for swine than for men,” as an English observer put it in 1597. Corn won a much warmer reception in the Middle East, where porridge had higher status; it was widely enough adopted as early as the 1520s to begin to have a favorable impact on population growth by providing new nutritional value. Corn was also adopted in northern India, while Portuguese introduction of corn to West Africa quickly formed the basis for a new staple crop. Several Chinese provinces picked up corn from India by the 17th century. Chili peppers had a lively trajectory: Spanish colonists learned to love them, but most West Europeans rejected their heat. The Portuguese brought knowledge of the plant to India, however, where it quickly joined other spices in dishes like Indian curry. From India it spread also to Thailand and (via the old Silk Road route) to several provinces in China now known for spicy foods. Africans also began to grow chilies, combining them with spices arriving in the Indian Ocean trade. The Chinese learned of the potato primarily through commercial contacts with the Philippines. Spaniards had imported the plant there in hopes of encouraging population growth. Additional food sources were eagerly sought in China, particularly in the famine conditions that developed around 1600. Sweet potatoes, particularly, brought greater caloric value than rice, with much less labor. Corn and peanuts also increased agricultural productivity and brought new flavors to several regional cuisines in China and other parts of Asia. European use of American crops took longer to develop, partly because there was less pressure on existing food supplies, partly because of fears of adopting foods not mentioned in the Bible and therefore seen as possible sources of disease. But by the later 17th century, adoption of the potato proceeded rapidly: fried potatoes sold by street vendors in Paris by the 1680s were the world’s original French fries. Food exchange continued in the early 18th century. It was at this point, for example – though we do not know the initial patterns precisely – that British merchants began to import pigs to crossbreed with local stocks. European pigs had traditionally foraged in forests; they were large but rangy. But now forests were receding. Chinese pigs, fed on garden scraps, were smaller than their European counterparts, but fatter, and with the capacity to gain weight rapidly. Merged pig breeds – also taken to the Americas, where Europeans had introduced the first pigs in the 16th century – generated much greater production of pork and bacon, ultimately supporting a more commercial approach that displaced peasant production. Food exchanges, on balance, served to generate greater global population growth, thus more than counterbalancing the results of global disease patterns. Chinese and, later, European populations surged particularly through the use of new foods, but there were impacts in the Middle East and elsewhere. Equally interesting, however, was the growing amalgamation of basic food sources around

86 Protoglobalization the world. Different cooking styles remained; food globalization at this point did not threaten regional identity in this regard. And, as we have seen, certain regions made distinctive basic choices, as with Europeans and corn or Indians and chili peppers. Nevertheless, the advance of foods of American origin was a global phenomenon. Today, it is estimated that a third of all the foods eaten around the world derive from plants that had originated in the Americas – and a full 39 percent of foods consumed in China. Here was a set of global adjustments, demonstrating the new range and power of exchange that continues to define how the world works today. One other interaction deserves attention, though it had no major demographic impact. The popularity of coffee, initially imported from East Africa, continued to gain ground in the Middle East, increasingly supporting a network of coffee houses where men could socialize. Europeans began to import not only the product but the social hub from the later 17th century onward. Interestingly, both in the Middle East and later in Europe, governments often tried to resist the coffee houses, fearing political agitation, but in both cases they were powerless against the new interest from consumers. Growing global consumption of chocolate, tea, and tobacco, as well as more traditional spices like nutmeg, also supported export production in commodities, in several different regions. Environmental Changes

The phase of globalization that opened up after 1500 brought significant environmental change as regions sought or were forced to seek new roles in world markets. We will see that more recent environmental globalization has some decisively new, and deeply troubling, features, associated most obviously with climate change; but the relationship is not entirely novel. Deforestation increased, particularly in the Americas, as farmers and estate owners expanded export production. The need for wood for expanding cities and particularly for shipbuilding played a major role as well. The importation of new animals also had a substantial environmental impact; grazing of close-crop grasslands by sheep in particular created new erosion problems in some regions in the Americas. In parts of Europe, and particularly Britain, supplies of wood began to run low by the mid-18th century, as major forests were eliminated. Fur traders expanded their activities, again with a global market in mind, both in Russia and in North America. Imported furs won wide sales in Europe, China, and elsewhere. In North America alone, over 400,000 animals were killed for their furs between 1700 and 1765, substantially reducing populations of wolves, beavers, and bison. Fur-bearing animals became quite rare on the North American Atlantic coast, forcing hunters, including Native Americans, to push westward; by the later 18th century, they also encountered Russian hunters who had crossed to Alaska in search of more abundant game as supplies in Siberia had been substantially reduced. Fishing activities increased as well, particularly in

The Main Features of Protoglobalization, 1500–1750  87 the North Atlantic, where cheap foods were sought among other things to feed slave populations in the Caribbean. Stocks of codfish declined rapidly as a result. Whaling became more difficult in the North Atlantic as well, as populations dropped, forcing new attention to the Pacific by the later 18th century. Hunting for export also expanded in Africa, with particular interest in the ivory in elephant tusks – traded extensively to Asia, often on European ships. Hunting levels in this case did not yet endanger the animal populations – this would await the 19th century – but they established patterns that are still important today. Global Organizations: The International Trading Companies Along with technology, the new global geography, and changing export dynamics, organizational capacity underwent fundamental innovation that was essential to the advance of globalization as a process. There are obvious mutual relationships here: new organizations depended on the improvements in transportation, modest as these were, and certainly on the growing enthusiasm for trade. But organization must be considered in its own right, for it was in the decades after 1500 that international business, as we would define it today, took a major step forward, becoming a permanent part of global interactions. Indeed, it was semi-private companies – organized by businessmen but with national government support – not governments themselves, that spearheaded most European efforts in global trade after 1500. Companies like the Dutch East Indies operation could even conduct wars, setting up forts on the Atlantic coast of Africa by 1600 in order to cut into Portuguese efforts to dominate trade. Soon after this, the same Dutch company seized territory at the southern tip of Africa (where Africans had previously repelled Portuguese efforts), importing half a million slaves from Malaysia (and forbidding those who were Muslim from practicing their religion openly) to provide necessary labor. The range of quasigovernmental operations, in this case and in many others, was striking – just as, in the world today, private, corporate enterprise often overshadows governments and political controls in pressing globalization forward. The capacity for conducting business transactions over long distances was of course already well established. Arab and other merchants, operating particularly on the Indian Ocean routes, had developed procedures to exchange funds or letters of credit as the basis for commercial transactions; this was a crucial part of the innovations that began to accumulate after 1000 CE. The actual organizational structures of trans-regional business, however, were not so clearly delineated. Many interactions depended on kinship ties or other personal links that could indeed stretch across different regions but had some obvious limitations. The new international trading companies, formed in Europe to take advantage of the growing opportunities for commerce in different parts of the world, sometimes in close association with colonial expansion, went well beyond existing precedent.

88 Protoglobalization In the first place, the trading companies that began to be formed in 16th-century Europe organized a number of shareholders, which allowed them to build up large amounts of capital. They did not depend on kinship groups alone. The Dutch East India Company, for example, established in 1602, had two types of shareholders: the participants, or non-managing partners who invested money in hope of return, and the 76 (later, 60) bewindhebbers who both invested and combined to manage the operation. Investors came from a variety of Dutch cities and raised an initial capital over 6 million guilders. Almost 400 businessmen initially joined in, despite a rather high minimum level, of 3,000 guilders, even for participants. High levels of capital permitted companies like the East India Company (known as Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC in Dutch) to acquire a large shipping fleet, while at the same time the Dutch government gave it a 21-year monopoly on colonial activities in Asia. Sheer size and scope have led some historians to label the company the world’s first multi-national corporation. But other organizations, including several trading companies in Britain, though they did not have quite such a large investment base, had similar characteristics. Unprecedented size and bureaucratic capacity, then, constituted the first organizational innovations. The second category of innovation featured an increasing tendency to combine trading activities, which earlier merchant groups had conducted albeit on a slightly smaller scale, with direct production ventures overseas. This economic diversification, with strong political corollaries, moved the international companies beyond mere exchange to a deeper role in the internal economies of various overseas areas. The Dutch East India Company fleet thus not only moved Southeast Asian spices back to Europe and to other parts of Asia but also utilized armed force to seize trading facilities and land in Java and other parts of what is now Indonesia. Alliances were formed with local rulers to acquire a monopoly over certain goods, while the Company also directly organized plantations to increase the output of key products. In the 1620s, the Dutch outfit forcibly expelled a large native population from the Banda Islands, killing many, so that new Dutch plantations could be established operating with slave labor. The goal was to increase the output of nutmeg and cloves, both valued spices back home, while cutting the costs. In the process, companies like the VOC, in Indonesia, or the British East India Company gained military and governmental capacities in key areas, essentially running colonies from corporate headquarters. When, in contemporary globalization, multi-national corporations are accused of wielding political influence over foreign governments, they are in many ways mimicking the power position of the international companies of four centuries before. Size and economic potency plus direct control over production and labor as well as trade were further enhanced by increasingly sophisticated management methods and financial techniques. The international companies could shift funds from place to place, exchange currencies, and contract for sales over extensive

The Main Features of Protoglobalization, 1500–1750  89 commercial routes. Branch centers regularly reported to the home office. The British East India Company, for example, was constantly updated about trade patterns, with regional reports that were carefully catalogued in the central archive back home while also copied for circulation to other branch locations. Accounting records reported sales and inventories for both foreign and domestic operations. An extensive personnel system sought talented recruits, though there was some preference for hiring the sons of shareholders; and the companies also tried to prevent vices such as excessive drinking or gambling. Great emphasis was placed on standardization: the British companies had elaborate “laws and standing orders” specifying the procedures to be followed for all sorts of routine activities. Here was a key move toward more impersonal, bureaucratic management applied now to the global arena. Not surprisingly, the international trading companies branched out vigorously, trading not only with the home country but with many other locations. The VOC had trading posts not only in Holland and Indonesia, but also Persia, China, India, Taiwan, Thailand, and elsewhere, and it also launched the Dutch colony at the tip of South Africa. It brought silver and copper from Japan to acquire silk from China and cotton from India, which were then traded to other parts of Asia for still more spices or brought back to Europe. By 1669, the VOC was the richest private company the world had ever seen, with over 150 merchant ships, 40 warships, 50,000 employees, and a private army of 10,000 soldiers. This was international organization on an unprecedented scale, with growing geographical range added to the other innovations in organizational structure, measurably increasing business capacity as a central ingredient in the process of mounting globalization. Global Inequalities and Regional Patterns The global contacts that developed after 1500 quickly installed new patterns of inequality among many of the regions involved. This was another crucial aspect of this stage of globalization, along with the heightened exchanges and new technologies and organizational forms. The inequalities in turn became impressively durable, and some have persisted into the 20th and 21st centuries. Contemporary globalization notoriously differentiates among regions, with some clearly profiting and others suffering obvious exploitation, though arguably some of the worst excesses have been declining. Essentials of this disturbing pattern began to be installed five centuries ago. Trans-regional contacts even earlier had involved inequalities among trading partners. Areas that routinely supplied slaves for interregional trade in return for manufactured goods were both demonstrating and accepting unequal bargaining status, rooted in part in differences in organizational and technological capacities and in relevant resources. But these inequalities cut less deeply into internal affairs and had fewer wide-ranging consequences than the systems that emerged

90 Protoglobalization after 1500. By this point, as social scientists like Immanuel Wallerstein have argued, regional inequalities linked trading advantages or disadvantages not just to commerce itself but also to social and political structures. And the inequalities proved so pervasive that they easily perpetuated themselves, if not permanently at least over large stretches of time. Here, arguably, was a fundamental feature of protoglobalization – and also a key reason that the results of globalization continue to attract so much anguished debate. Regional inequality was not yet a worldwide phenomenon. It applied particularly to areas that came under European military control – notably the Americas and parts of Southeast Asia, though West Africa was also deeply affected. Other parts of the world, though for the most part participating in global trade, did so on a more independent footing, and some of them profited extensively. However, the inequality network did expand over time: by the 18th century, parts of Eastern Europe and India were being drawn in, in India’s case in part because of European military intervention. Further, the inequality system was also beginning to generate new attitudes in Europe itself, including racist beliefs, that complicated global relationships at the time and since. Dominance and Subordination

Here’s how the pattern developed where regional inequalities became most vivid. European governments and merchants, benefiting among other things from their superior weaponry, forced their way into the Americas hoping to find great wealth. Spain and Portugal headed the parade, but ultimately Britain, France, and Holland gained the clearest economic advantages. Quickly enough, the European powers found that they could use the Americas as sources of relatively inexpensive raw materials and foods. Silver from the mines of the Andes was the clearest delight, as it served European markets while also giving merchants the wherewithal to buy cherished Asian spices and manufactured goods; but colonists quickly set up plantations to generate sugar, dyes, tobacco, and (later) cotton, all for export to consumers back home. Brazil and the Caribbean focused particular attention for plantation activity, but the southern colonies in British North America followed suit as well. From some parts of the Americas also, forestry products and furs also served market needs. In return for these items, Europeans sold manufactured goods like guns and beads, and also expanded their craft industries to provide furniture, paintings, and fashionable clothing for the wealthy minority in the colonies. Profit came in three forms in this colonial economic relationship, as Europe learned how to gain wealth at the expense of their new holdings. First, the products Europe sold, because they were processed goods, commanded better prices than the colonial commodities did. As we will see, Europeans gradually learned how to expand their sales inventory, generating a wider array of manufactured goods. Second, the goods were carried in both directions in European ships, and while there

The Main Features of Protoglobalization, 1500–1750  91 was risk involved in this there were also additional opportunities for earnings. And finally, the whole operation was organized as we have seen by European merchant companies, who had their own fees to charge. European earnings from this new global trade increased wealth for many, providing new levels of capital, new opportunities for consumer spending, and new sources of tax revenues for growing states. By 1650, for example, despite grinding poverty among a growing working class dependent on wage labor, the average British standard of living was three times higher than it had been in 1300. The economies on the other side of the equation, initially concentrated in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the southern colonies of British North America, served almost as mirror image of the thriving European core. Revenue was being taken away, on balance. Individuals could gain wealth, to be sure, as plantation or mine owners. But the system depended on low commodity prices, which meant in turn low-wage labor. Use of slaves and semi-free peasant workers on estates helped keep pay levels down for the majority. Only small local merchant classes could operate, because the overseas trade was organized by Europeans; and there was no shipping industry to speak of, and only limited local manufacturing. Governments were weak – which meant few controls over European activities or the operations of the landowners – among other things because the tax base was constrained. Some change could occur in this equation. Spain and Portugal slipped from their initial power position, in part because little manufacturing developed at home, and of course more aggressive competitors from northwestern Europe took their place. By the 18th century, regional trade and manufacturing in Latin America expanded somewhat around the major cities. But the basic inequality was very hard to escape. With growing investment funds and more powerful states, the rich – that is, countries like Britain – found it relatively easy to get richer. It was at least as hard for the poor regions to escape their poverty. Ill-paid workers often lacked skills for more than menial labor, and they certainly had scant motivation to strive for more. Governments were hampered in trying to spearhead change. The lack of a vibrant merchant group was an obvious problem. Estate owners had wealth, but often saw little reason to try to change the system that brought them individual profit. Notoriously, they typically preferred to use personal wealth to expand their own consumption levels, traveling to Europe and buying European art objects, rather than investing locally. The poor regions tended to stay poor. Furthermore, the reach of this system of inequality tended to expand with time, affecting areas that were not held as formal colonies. West Africans, induced into the slave trade, became dependent on a global trade pattern that brought individual profits for local slave traders and governments, but disruption and misery, and scant earnings, for the bulk of the region’s population. Only a few African kingdoms carefully held back from this brutal exchange. Europeans, selling manufactured goods and operating the ships and commercial

92 Protoglobalization companies, made their disproportionate profits here as in Latin America. By the 18th century, parts of Eastern Europe like Poland, exporting cheap grains to West European markets and depending on low-paid serf labor on the great estates, began to lock themselves into patterns broadly similar to those in the Americas. Imports of more expensive European goods, particularly for the wealthy, confirmed the unequal relationship. Even the Russian economy, relying on harsh serfdom and exporting commodities like furs, timber, and grain, took on some of the characteristics of economic dependency by the 18th century. So, finally, did the parts of Indonesia under Dutch control, where the slave-based plantation economy focused on increased production of spices. Europe’s Outlook on the World As European prosperity increased more rapidly than that of any other region during the period of protoglobalization, attitudes changed accordingly. In 1500, European venturers typically expressed awe at the great cities they encountered, even in central America, and there was considerable admiration for Africa as well. By 1700, this openness was giving way to a vigorous sense of superiority, as Europeans began to exaggerate their advantages over other parts of the world. While this pattern was not unprecedented – at their height, Arabs had unkind things to say about the level of civilization in Western Europe or Russia – it went farther than it had before, with more vicious consequences. Thus, China was belittled for its technological conservatism, a failure to keep up with the times. This was in fact inaccurate: Chinese manufacturing technology continued to be superior to its European counterpart in many sectors well into the 18th century, and it was not stagnant. But European self-satisfaction was careless about accuracy. India’s vast traditional knowledge was similarly belittled: one British observer claimed that all of it would fit on a single shelf of a British gentleman’s library. Middle Eastern governments were condemned for backwardness and sexual corruption, with exaggerated stories about what went on in the harem of the Ottoman sultan. The extent to which Europe was learning or had learned from other regions was consistently downplayed. Attitudes toward native Americans were a bit mixed, as stories about noble savages rivalled criticisms of native customs. In South America, some Catholic missionaries urged careful treatment of local populations. In fact, however, on both American continents, European settlers and governments ran roughshod over native groups, seizing territory and in some cases deliberately promoting disease. Toward Africans, and particularly African slaves, European opinion hardened quickly – if only to justify the brutal treatment being applied. Historians have debated when racist ideas first surfaced in Europe – the assumption that whole peoples were inferior because of their inherited race: they may have predated the slave trade. There is no question however that beliefs about the limitations

The Main Features of Protoglobalization, 1500–1750  93 of Africa and African people spread widely by the 17th and 18th centuries. Thus, a British slaveowner, Edward Long, could write in 1774 that Africa was filled with “everything that was monstrous in nature,” its people barely human. Slavery, in this view, was a blessing for the Africans, pulling them out of chaos that they could not control, and providing the protection of White ownership. Like the other features of regional inequality under protoglobalization, new prejudices and racism would have a long life, continuing to complicate other aspects of globalization into the contemporary period. Limits on Regional Inequality Regional inequality was not yet a global system, just as European racism did not yet extend to the world as a whole. The world economy during protoglobalization flourished not only because of European initiatives but also because of the dynamism of a number of other centers. East Asian countries, to take the most important case, either continued to profit from world trade or isolated themselves from extensive involvement. Grasping the complexity of regional economic relationships under protoglobalization has been one of the key goals of world history research in recent decades. Thus, British colonies in North America, outside the south, generated an active merchant class and extensive shipping and local manufacturing; they did not match European wealth, but they avoided dependency. Many parts of East Africa also lay largely outside the European net, though there was some contact; patterns of trade continued to highlight contacts with the Middle East. Most parts of Asia also maintained distinctive relationships with the new patterns of globalization. They were actively involved, but largely on their own terms. Japan, after initial interest in European trade, decided on substantial isolation from 1600 onward, in order to protect Japanese culture and religion plus the dominant social class. Only Dutch merchants were allowed occasional contact, through a single port; and Japanese were prevented from traveling abroad. Japan proceeded to construct a robust internal commercial economy in the ensuing centuries, but without significant global interaction. China is a far more complex case, and this has generated considerable confusion. Chinese trade with southeast Asia continued, and many Chinese merchants located in this region. Active contacts with the Philippines had allowed China to learn of American foods, like sweet potatoes, which were adopted more quickly than in Europe. And China proved to be the largest recipient of American silver, brought by European merchants who sought manufactured goods like silks and porcelain. The Chinese regulated this trade rather closely to prevent undue European influence; most of it was channeled through the Portuguese-controlled port of Macao. So China participated strongly in the new global economy, and profited considerably. But outside southeast Asia, Chinese merchants did not

94 Protoglobalization actively reach out; they depended, rather, on European initiatives, including European shipping. This system worked well at the time, but it may have served China badly for the future – posing an interesting challenge for appropriate historical interpretation. India formed yet another regional case. India initially benefited greatly from new global trade opportunities. After China, the region gained the largest amount of New World silver, brought in exchange not only for spices but also manufactured goods like printed cotton cloth, which was sold widely to various parts of Asia as well as Europe. Indian merchants, also, maintained considerable activity in Indian Ocean trade, despite new competition from the European merchant companies – though merchants were not active in the world beyond the Indian Ocean. By the 18th century, however, in part because of growing political disarray as the once-great Mughal empire declined, India’s global position deteriorated. British and French concerns competed for internal influence, with the British winning out after the Seven Years War, 1756–63; increasingly the British East India Company wielded primary political authority on the subcontinent, in alliance with various local princes. At least as important, Britain passed laws limiting Indian industrial imports, seeking to protect new British manufacturing industries in sectors like cotton. India began to be drawn into the larger pattern of economic inequality. An 18th-century observer described clearly the new pattern of exploitation: But such is the little regard which they [the British] show to the people of this kingdom, and such their apathy and indifference for their welfare, which the people under their dominion groan everywhere, and are reduced to poverty and distress. Finally, the Middle East, though disadvantaged by the new trading emphasis on the Atlantic Ocean rather than the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean, maintained its own political and economic strengths without falling into full dependency. Clusters of European merchants located in Middle Eastern cities, operating by their own laws, but local trade and manufacturing persisted as well. Globalization after 1500, though benefiting Europe disproportionately, was not simply a European enterprise. Many regions participated in most respects on their own terms, and patterns of involvement varied accordingly. The result highlighted a complex set of regional differences even as contacts expanded, and featured as well a number of important continuities from the earlier transregional network. Continuities in Asia and Africa The “stages of globalization” approach, logically pursued, means that each major new step builds on, although also transforms, steps taken earlier, rather than simply wiping the slate clean. It is not surprising, then, that along with new

The Main Features of Protoglobalization, 1500–1750  95 participants and trade routes, older patterns persisted as well, so that exchanges of different types coexisted and in combination increased the overall level of interaction. Emphasis on these elements of continuity is all the more important in that many scholars in recent years have criticized undue fascination with the doings of Europeans and the opening of the Atlantic because it leads to neglect of the continued vibrancy of the trade and manufacturing operations in Africa and Asia that had been established earlier. Indeed, it is important to remember that in many ways Europeans, flush now with gold and particularly silver from the Americas, were trying to break into a preexisting system, with a primary goal of seeking greater access to Asian products. This in itself suggests that elements of the older, pre-European system might retain considerable vitality and even generate extensions of its own. Thus, overland trade ranging from the Middle East, to Persia, to central Asia, Russia, and western China continued in the centuries after 1500, with little or no direct connection to the innovations involved in transatlantic and transpacific commerce. Much of this trade depended on special merchant groups, linked by religion and kinship, as had been the case before. Thus, Armenians fanned out from the Iranian city of Julfa, reaching the Ottoman Empire and Russia in the west, India, Thailand, and Burma to the east. Significant colonies of Armenian merchants operated in Burma alone. Overall, Armenians traded cotton, various food delicacies like sea slugs (valued especially in China), and other items. Indian merchants, often carrying textiles, moved northward from India into Russia, forming a large colony on the Caspian Sea. Again, kinship was heavily involved, as merchant families sent relatives to the outlying areas, expecting that they would return every 5 years or so and be replaced by other kin. Indian Ocean trade also retained many older patterns. For all their efforts, and their superior weaponry, the Portuguese never managed to control more than 50 percent of the spice trade in the 16th century. They failed to break into connections branching out from the Rea Sea at all. This meant that large numbers of Arab, Persian, Indian, and southeast Asian merchants maintained many of the long-distance trading links that their ancestors had pioneered several centuries before. As had previously been the case, Chinese activity in Southeast Asia, both by sea and overland, remained extensive. Chinese expeditions even penetrated to the northern coast of Australia, seeking various foodstuffs including sea slugs. By 1600, over 30,000 Chinese merchants operated in the Philippines, and other large clusters were scattered throughout Southeast Asia. While China depended on European companies to sell its goods worldwide, in return for payments in American silver, the country remained very active in regional trade. It was in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, rather than China proper, where Chinese and European merchants discussed the latest designs on goods like porcelain, destined for European markets.

96 Protoglobalization European interference occasionally touched East Africa, but here too for the most part older patterns prevailed, with some new intensities. This was in marked contrast to the situation in West Africa, where earlier trans-Saharan emphasis was substantially replaced by the new lures of the Atlantic trade as mediated by the European merchants. In East Africa, trade along the Swahili coast continued to interact with the Middle East, and this included the slave caravans that maintained earlier connections. Exchange centers like Malindi grew further, facilitating activities by Indian merchants who connected East Africa not only with India but with Southeast Asia. Indian textiles were exchanged for exotic African goods. Japan, even as it fostered growing isolation in many ways, also built on some of its earlier trade connections in the 16th and 17th centuries. By the early 17th century, about 10 percent of the Japanese economy depended on exports, with Japanese shipping reaching not only China but also Southeast Asia. These various dynamic connections confirmed the importance of earlier innovations and their survival power even in a new era. They remind us that the inclusion of the Americas and the new position power of European outreach, though important, even in reshaping activities in Asia as well as West Africa, are not the only story. The multiplicity of patterns, both old and new, actually adds to the force of protoglobalization after 1500, even as it somewhat complicates the standard story. At the same time, the vitality of these older links, and the innovations that could still spring from them, seriously modified at least for several centuries the worst impacts of global economic inequalities. Not only could many Asian societies, headed by India and China, expand their production for European and (through them) American buyers, winning much American silver in the process. They and other parts of Asia and East Africa maintained significant opportunities for profit in production and trade independent of the European-run commercial systems. They were not, as a result, forced into a stark choice between a dependent status or some attempt to avoid trans-regional interactions altogether. The Limitations of Early Modern Globalization The importance of global developments from 1500 onward, even amid the vitality of older systems in Asia and Africa, must not of course conceal the limitations of the systems involved: full-fledged globalization moved closer, and there was stimulus for still further change, but this was not a globalized world in our contemporary sense. Two features stand out: the relatively modest changes in the technological apparatus, and the striking decline of overt imitation among many societies. The European capacity to sail across the Atlantic and Pacific, as we have seen, signaled some significant improvements in shipping and navigational capacity. Knowledge advanced about the geography of the Americas and, by the

The Main Features of Protoglobalization, 1500–1750  97 18th century, Pacific Oceania including Australia, which resulted in more accurate charts which in turn facilitated transportation still further. But long-distance travel remained slow and often risky, and there were severe limits on the volume and range of goods that could be carried. Printing affected communication, ultimately with some global implications, but aside from this communication patterns remained little changed. It took a long time to get information about developments in one part of the world to other parts. Evolution, not revolution, describes the relevant global technologies in this period, with the obvious exception of the new power of guns; and while this did not prevent steady gains in trade contacts it was an obvious constraint. The Issue of Culture Even more interesting, because in so many ways it was counterintuitive, was the extensive turn away from acceptance of significant cultural contacts or voluntary or deliberate imitation after 1500. In this case, the contrast has two faces: it distinguishes this phase of globalization from what would happen later, but also from what had happened in the previous early globalization phase around 1000 CE. Precisely because contacts or potential contacts increased, many societies either intentionally or implicitly pulled back from too much cultural connection, eager to preserve identities even in a gradually shrinking world. Cultural globalization, hinted at earlier, vital today, was not a wide feature of exchange after 1500. Mutual influences did persist, of course, and the Americas provided a huge new setting for cultural imports. Islam continued its spread into Southeast Asia, including the southern Philippines, early in the new period; and Ottoman conquests allowed new conversions in the Balkans. Christianity gained on the heels of European conquest and commerce. Missionaries gained considerable success in Latin America and ultimately among imported African slaves. Of course, Christian ideas were mixed with older religious beliefs and practices. In Mexico, for example, Mayans and other Indian groups managed to preserve elements of some of their traditional gods and goddesses in the guise of Christian saints. But these combinations were exactly what should be expected from mutual influence. With Christianity and European control also came new artistic styles and new standards for family behavior. Many Europeans professed dismay at local sexual practices and urgently promoted different patterns of dress and less independence for women. Again, not all of these influences were fully accepted, but there was change. In the Americas, further, the arrival of significant European groups brought Western culture directly, establishing complex relationships between American and European cultural practices. Some Christian conversion also occurred in other centers of European power, for example amid some urban residents in West African ports, or in Portuguese Goa in India.

98 Protoglobalization Other signs of cultural contact surfaced. European painting styles and even fashions had some impact among the upper classes in Mughal India, and the name “Mary” even caught on for many Indian girls. Briefly, in the 16th century, European influence brought some Christian conversions in Japan, though these were later attacked. Chinese elites showed modest interest in Christian missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries so long as the missionaries carefully took on Confucian dress and manners. Europeans were valued for their knowledge of clocks and some other curiosities, though the outreach was not extensive. For their part, Europeans eagerly learned about some aspects of the societies they now encountered, for example importing exotic animals as well as potentially useful plants. But limitations and positive avoidance were on the whole more important. Europeans, increasingly proud of their technological achievements, often felt they had little to learn, in the cultural sphere, from any other part of the world. They might be impressed with the wealth of other places, and with the power of rulers, but this did not translate into active imitation of cultural values. Indeed, European self-satisfaction explained why Asian societies, and particularly the Ottoman Empire, came increasingly to be regarded as a bit backward and decadent, though these stereotypes blossomed fully only in the 18th century. Interest in benefiting from Islamic philosophical or scientific achievements declined notably, though some historians have argued that what really changed was European willingness to admit they were still copying, for example in mathematics, rather than a full refusal to learn. In turn, several other societies passed up learning opportunities or prevented them outright. Notoriously, at the end of the 16th century, Japanese leaders began to turn against European and other outside influences, while attacking Christian leaders and converts within their own society. They professed fear of potential Spanish influence (based on their knowledge of the colonization of the Philippines) and related Catholic interference in Japanese culture. They also sought to protect the established feudal social order from the disruption that would come with uncontrolled access to European guns. The limits on travel for the Japanese themselves curtailed exchanges with Asia as well. Among Europeans, only Dutch traders (less feared at this point than the Spanish) were allowed very limited contact through a single port near Nagasaki. Significant developments continued within Japan itself, including fuller use of the Confucian ideas taken over earlier from China, but interaction with the outside world was severely curtailed for over a century. Chinese authorities began to attack Christian missionaries in the early 18th century, despite their fairly limited impact, again in a desire to preserve cultural and social order from outside contagion. The issue was sparked by a new ruling by the papacy that insisted that Christian missionaries avoid adopting Chinese dress and habits; the more hostile Chinese stance responded to this sign of cultural intolerance, but it did serve to curtail what was already only a modest exchange.

The Main Features of Protoglobalization, 1500–1750  99 Ottoman rulers, though well acquainted with developments in Europe, on the whole also held back from much imitation, albeit without so many explicit prohibitions. Notably, European printing was not permitted within Ottoman realms until the 1730s, presumably in the interests of preserving Islamic ideas and Ottoman political control from challenges that might result from a wider dissemination of new knowledge. All of this meant that even technology transfer, though it did occur, was slower and less complete in Asia and Africa than might otherwise have been expected. And an interest in learning from European science, which was beginning to advance rapidly in findings, methods, and technologies by the 17th century, lagged noticeably. Interestingly, Ottoman rulers did begin to import European doctors, though in fact their knowledge was not notably superior to that of Islamic physicians at the time. However, the broader reaches of science were largely neglected. Protoglobalization was an important development, but its impact varied depending on regional priorities. Many possibilities were stillborn as a result. The consequences of global contact, so vivid on the side of trade and food exchange, were thus artificially limited by conscious policies and (as with the Europeans) cultural aversions alike. The fact that societies could stand apart to this extent was already a sign of the limits of globalization, and the fact that they chose to do so was revealing as well – though even in more recent phases of globalization the importance of regional choice persists. Neither European example nor European guns, so potent in some respects, drew many societies in at this juncture. Exceptions did develop, even aside from the areas of direct European control, though mainly in the 18th century. Japan, for example, which after all had a model of successful imitation in its past, slightly relaxed its prohibitions by the middle of the century. Aware of European advances from the contacts with the Dutch (and from Japanese employed to translate with the Dutch merchants), Japanese authorities began to allow translations of Western works in science and medicine (however, deliberately, not other subjects). This was a wedge that would provide the basis for further expansion in the next phase of globalization, when Japan entered world systems with a vengeance. Ottoman strictures, as we have seen, also relaxed a bit, yet there was no focused imitation. It was Russia, another society with a successful imitation record from the previous period, that most obviously stretched toward deliberate learning, as contacts with Western Europe expanded. Russian leaders had reached out to Western architects as early as the 16th century seeking benefits from Renaissance styles adapted to Russian traditions. Far more important was the deliberate Westernization effort launched by Tsar Peter the Great at the end of the 17th century. Peter wanted several items from current Western practice. He sought military and naval technology, and related manufacturing techniques in metallurgy and armaments, to try to make Russia a military power capable of competing

100 Protoglobalization in European affairs. He was interested in a more rationally organized and better trained bureaucracy. He wanted his upper classes to be exposed to Western scientific and technical education, and hoped this would lead to improvements in agriculture and other areas. A 1714 regulation thus ordained: The Great Sovereign has decreed: in all provinces children between the ages of ten and fifteen of the nobility, of government clerks, and of lesser officials … must be taught mathematics and some geometry. Without certificates [of study] they should not be allowed to marry …. Peter hoped, finally, that these same upper classes would learn Western art and fashion so that they would seem less backward to European visitors. To effect all this, he imported European advisors, including artisans; he sent Russians themselves abroad for study; and he relied heavily on the trade brought by colonies of Western merchants in cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow. In no sense did he seek to make Russia fully Western: he did not try to imitate Western commerce nor did he seek to alter social structure or lower-class religious culture. Still, this was a huge effort at imitation that would have enduring consequences, as subsequent generations of Russians debated the value of Russian versus a more Western identity and as many in the upper classes accelerated their travels and cultural contacts. Again, however, this effort stands out in the period as the only large exception to a general impulse to avoid much cultural interaction except where it was applied through the compulsion of colonial rule. Older patterns of imitation, for example of China by its neighbors, also receded. Cultural globalization was yet to come, and it could even be argued that its forerunners were temporarily in retreat. 1500 as Turning Point Developments from 1500 onward added important new elements in the process of globalization, building on but also changing the initiatives that had emerged earlier. The new geography was crucial. Inclusion of the Americas not only created a truly global map but also helped spur the unprecedented exchanges of goods, foods, diseases, and people – and environmental impacts. But other innovations warrant attention as well: globalization was now more weaponized than had been the case before, particularly because of the new role of heavily-armed ships. Figuring out the relationship between globalization and violence becomes a vital topic from this point onward. The establishment of global bureaucracies is another highlight, for better or worse, in the new colonial outreach but particularly in the structures and activities of the international trading companies. Finally, global consumerism began to emerge as well, beyond the elite interest in silks and porcelains of an earlier day. An anthropologist has plausibly argued that European passions for imported sugar, spreading well down the social scale,

The Main Features of Protoglobalization, 1500–1750  101 constituted the first mass consumer interest that depended on imports from other parts of the world. And this innovation would be extended, with European delight in coffee, tea, and chocolate, but also the growing Chinese interest in imported silver or African adoption of imported guns. But the limitations were striking as well. Technological change was vital but, arguably, not yet revolutionary in terms of speed and capacity, particularly in the area of communication. Different regions could and did choose different levels of involvement – a factor still visible today but much more fundamental in the centuries after 1500. Finally, the restrictions on cultural contact were particularly revealing. Europeans hesitated to change their food cultures, while many Asian regions clearly opted to defend established identities over the lure of exchange. The result was clearly a distinctive era in the larger history of globalization’s expanding reach. Further Readings On biological and food exchanges, see Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World (New York, 2010); Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange (Westport, CT, 2003) and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York, 2004); Kenneth Kiple, The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (Cambridge, 1993); Jeffrey Pilcher, Food in World History (2nd ed., New York, 2023); Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of a Fish That Changed the World (New York, 1997). On the environment, see John J. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley, CA, 2003); Stephen Mosley, The Environment in World History (2nd ed., New York, 2024); Guha Ramachandra, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York, 2000). On trade patterns and naval warfare, see Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge MA, 2009); K.N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company (Cambridge, 2006); Giogio Riello and Tirthanken Roy, eds., How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500-1850 (Leiden, 2009); Carlo Cipolla, Guns, Sails and Empire (Mill Valley, CA, 1985); Jane Hooper, Feeding Globalization: Madagascar and the provisioning trade, 1600-1800 (Athens, OH, 2017); Andrew Sharratt, Trade Routes: The Growth of Global Trade (Oxford, 2003); Carla Phillips, Navies and the Mediterranean in the Early Modern Period (New York, 2000); Kris Lane and Arne Bialushcewski, eds., Piracy in the Early Modern Era; An Anthology of Sources (Indianapolis, IN, 2019). On consumerism, see Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain (Oxford, 1992); Peter N. Stearns, Consumerism in World History (2nd ed., New York, 2006); Craig Chinas, Superfluous

102 Protoglobalization Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Honolulu, 2004); S.A.M. Adshead, Material Culture Europe and China, 1400-1800 (New York, 1997). On regional inequality, see Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System I. Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century and The Modern World System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750 (St. Louis, MO, 1980); Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC, 2004); Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World 1550-1800 (Cambridge, 2008); Jack Goldstone, Why Europe? (New York, 2008). On the slave trade, see Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (2nd ed., Cambridge, 2010); Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, MA, 2000). On racism and other ideas of European superiority, see Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt, Racism in the Modern World: Historical Perspectives on Cultural Transformations and Adaptations (New York, 2014); Michael Adas, Machines the Measure of Man (Ithaca, NY, 1990).

6

A Late-18th-Century Transition

Several trends set in motion during the period of protoglobalization accelerated during the later 18th century and into the early 19th, and a few interesting new elements were introduced. The result was another transition period that would contribute to a more decisive new phase of globalization by the middle of the 19th century. A few historians, in fact, use these decades as the departure point for globalization itself. Thus, the “short history” of globalization, by Osterhammel and Petersson, highlights the emergence of a global colonial conflict in the mid-18th century, along with the wave of revolutions that swept through Western Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean shortly thereafter. (Osterhammel has embellished his argument in a big book on the 19th-century world more generally.) The Seven Years War (1756–63) pitted Britain and France in battles not only in and around Europe but in North America and the Caribbean and in India as well. The War would end with enhanced British power in India, as what had been an important set of trading outposts began gradually to turn into fuller colonial governance, and also a reduction of India’s manufacturing capacity in favor of British industry and Indian commodities contributions. There is indeed no question that Britain’s global capacity began to increase steadily, as against French, Dutch, and particularly Spanish involvements, with gains in North America, South Africa, and elsewhere as well. But while this was an important power shift, it did not necessarily change fundamental global dynamics. One of the problems with some of the claims about the mid-18th century as a turning point is an undue focus on British leadership rather than global contacts more generally, where a number of other Western countries continued to contribute as well. The heightened British role can be granted without necessarily claiming that this altered the basic patterns of protoglobalization. Another approach to the same decades makes more systematic claims. C.A. Bayly, a historian at Cambridge University, argues that only in the later 18th century did a decisive gap open between what he calls “archaic” globalization and the modern version. Basically, Bayly contends that developments from the Silk Roads through the intensification of the trans-regional network and on to the inclusion of DOI: 10.4324/9781003439615-9

104 Protoglobalization the Americas constituted a definite though early form of “globalization,” bringing serious contacts and consequences to the societies involved. But he also argues that all of this, even through the initial rise of the great trading companies, constituted a system different from what globalization would come to involve later on. The argument includes emphasis on the undeniable continuities, for example in trade patterns within Asia, from early globalization on into the 18th century. Two developments, Bayly suggests, both sponsored by West Europeans and particularly the British, fundamentally altered the situation around 1750, even though a few remnants of the earlier patterns would persist well into the 19th century. First, governments became more powerful and effective – particularly in Europe, but also in some other areas like the Ottoman Empire and, soon, the new United States. This allowed greater control over nomadic incursions and other disruptions of trade, such as piracy. Britain controlled the seas and provided new levels of security in the process, while the United States would play a key role in reducing piracy from North Africa. Trade and transportation became more reliable, as earlier oscillations came to a halt. More important still was the intensification of larger capitalist enterprises – the great trading companies but also the workings of the slave plantations in the Caribbean, which increasingly replaced the more personalized, religiously based links that had sustained trans-regional commerce previously. The new operations were more fiercely profit-driven than more traditional merchants had been. They increased the size of investments in interregional trade and production for this trade, and they were willing to introduce huge changes in labor systems to drive production up; in contrast, while the more traditional merchants had often indirectly encouraged more export activity, they had not directly managed the operations. The organizations also provided more impersonal management techniques capable of operating over large distances without the need for personal connections. All of this meant that most dynamic international companies were ready, by the mid-18th century, to push global trade to unprecedented levels, with equally unprecedented impacts on local economies and local workers. Finally – though Bayly himself does not deal with this additional facet – other historians would add to the claims about a mid-18th-century turning point by noting the increasing European, mainly British, activities in the Pacific, which began to impact Oceania, Australia, and New Zealand directly and also led to new levels of geographic and biological knowledge about this part of the world. It was in 1788, for example, that the British sent a first batch of settlers, including a number of convicts, to Australia, to begin the settlement process there, along with displacement of many indigenous peoples. The first continuous contacts with Hawaii started with a British expedition in 1778, quickly followed by the arrival of American traders and missionaries and the establishment of some foreign-owned plantations.

A Late-18th-Century Transition  105 The arguments for a late-18th-century transformation are interesting and well worth considering. The key question obviously is whether most of these changes had not already been set in motion by the transformations after 1500, such that it’s the earlier date, not 1750, which offers the clearest break with the past. After all, the great trading companies and the new Atlantic slave system were both installed in the 16th century, with the more impersonal investment and management patterns also emerging at that earlier point. The Pacific was crossed in the early 16th century as well, and Spanish use of connections between the Americas and Asia – particularly the Philippines – developed strongly thereafter. To be sure, all of this accelerated by the 18th century. Far more Pacific territory began to be involved in global systems, and the trading companies – particularly, the British East India Company’s expansion of operations in India – did gain further scope. But this was, it can be argued, intensification, not a fundamental shift. Of course, a compromise might involve accepting both 1500 and 1750 as departure points, but this might begin to clutter the historical approach to globalization with an unduly complicated chronology. This is where the idea of transition, rather than decisive turning point, might come into play, allowing scholars to have their cake and eat it too. If 1000 CE is taken as the first clear phase of early globalization, we have seen that subsequent developments, and particularly the 150 years of the interlocking Mongol empires, not only intensified the trans-regional networks but also ushered in something of a transition toward the next clear phase. Similarly, developments around 1750, though clearly building on the basic patterns of protoglobalization, began to move toward a next, later break. Inclusion of the Americas and the Pacific, the formation of new forms of international commercial organization, and the development of greater and persistent global inequalities – all the result of the 1500 phase – were still being digested, their impact steadily increasing as Bayly and others in a way suggest. The growing role of impersonal capitalism, although introduced in the 1500 phase, can readily be granted, as the international trading companies expanded their operations, along with the clearer decline of some of the older merchant forms. And several other changes can also be highlighted, although two at least again constitute extensions of the implications of the 1500 phase. In combination with mounting capitalism, they do help explain why the levels of globalization that had surged after 1500 were about to change into a definable new global phase from approximately 1850 onward. Change #1: Toward a New Consumerism Global trade has always closely related to consumer behaviors and motivations. From the Silk Road exchanges through most of the activities on the trans-­regional network during early globalization, most relevant consumer involvements stemmed from the elites. From 1500 onward, while elite concerns continued to

106 Protoglobalization play a great role in supporting global trade, a wider range of consumers began to be involved. We have seen that several food imports first attracted this broader interest. Attachment to coffee and tea spread from the Middle East and from East and Central Asia, respectively, to other regions, again with wider publics involved. Tea became one of those sought-after Asian products that fueled the exchange with European traders for New-World silver, while the taste spread to the Americas as well (where, briefly in Boston, dumping tea became a form of protest against British taxation policies). Sugar of course was an even greater draw, with hosts of Europeans eagerly seeking the product by the 16th century (and with their teeth measurably suffering in the process, at least until the advent of better dentistry in the 18th century). Growing Chinese urban prosperity, founded in part on the silver imports won in world trade, also drove new levels of consumer interest, for both global and local products. Even New England merchants began to export to China after the American revolution, selling ginseng, furs, and sandalwood. From the 16th century onward, in other words, large numbers of people in several parts of the world – not the very poor, but not elites alone – were participating in a globally based consumerism that sustained production and trade in several commodities, and this process would intensify with each passing decade. Thus, Dutch urbanites in the 17th century, benefiting from their nation’s success in global trade, indulged in a buying frenzy for tulips and pictures of tulips, one of the first consumer crazes in history. Tulips became a Dutch staple in the process, but the initial focus had actually been imported from the Ottoman Empire. By the late 17th century, popular interest in coffee, tea, and sugar was also supporting a growth in table service – in pots, spoons, cups and saucers. Some of these were imported from China, often resulting from direct negotiations among merchants over what designs would sell best, though some began to be manufactured locally. But the larger point was that, nourished by global interests, consumer passions were expanding to embrace household items and other goods. The result, in turn, was a level of consumer expectations and networks of shops to service these expectations that were generating a real revolution in modern consumerism by the 18th century, and this would in turn play a further role in supporting global trade in the future. Globalization, in other words, no longer depended on elite tastes and capacities alone, at least in the wealthier societies of the world. This was another factor that would simply blossom further when transitional developments led to a more decisive new stage in the globalization process. Change #2: New Attitudes about the World A few sectors of what we now know as public opinion, initially in parts of Western Europe and North America, began to move toward a more inclusive definition of humanity in the later 18th century, which in turn would generate some strikingly new and potentially global standards for human treatment. This was

A Late-18th-Century Transition  107 a very tentative development, which conflicted with a variety of prejudices including the growing racist bias, but it too would feed the next phase of globalization opening after 1850. It relied on growing literacy and the expansion of early newspapers in Europe and North America, supporting new kinds of public involvement even before the advent of democratic voting. The idea of global humane standards was not brand new. The major world religions had recognized the spiritual potential in all humans, though this warred with the fact that each religion insisted on its own monopoly of truth, so that humans who happened to be in other religions were not regarded as full spiritual equals. Further, some earlier philosophers, for example in Western Europe, had talked about certain natural laws that would apply to all people. Individuals, like the 14th-century Chinese observer cited in Chapter 3, might occasionally write about the desirability of sweeping aside all boundaries in favor of a single humanity – he wrote in the excitement of the contacts that emerged with the Mongol empires. But a movement that explicitly operated from a sense of basic standards that should cut across political and religious barriers and apply to distant people with whom one had no other tie – this was a global innovation. And, unlike some other developments in the later 18th century, this one could not easily be predicted from the shifts that had begun to take shape after 1500. The focus, gaining momentum, though sporadically, from the 1780s onward, was a new and often passionate belief in the evils of enslaving other human beings and the moral responsibility for all decent people, whether involved in the slave system or not, to work for its abolition. Slavery was of course a very old labor arrangement, and while various observers, including Islamic and Christian religious leaders, had criticized its excesses, no one had clearly enunciated global standards that sought to root it out entirely. In the 18th century, however, a combination of the unusually great exploitation in the Atlantic slave trade and the great American plantations, highlighted by some former slaves themselves who began to appeal to a wider public, and what historians have described as a “new sensibility” born of variant strands of Christianity like Quakerism plus the ideals of the Enlightenment, began to generate the first potentially global crusade against a widespread human abuse. Soon, abolitionists were organizing massive petitions and other forms of pressure under slogans that pointed to what they called the “principles of justice and humanity.” They saw themselves as “friends of the slave of every nation and clime,” and they talked of “the whole civilized world witnessing with horror” efforts to defend the institution of bondage. By the late 1780s, up to 20 percent of the entire population of some British cities were signing anti-slavery petitions, and deliberate efforts to spread the word across political and geographic boundaries became the first example of mobilizing a globally applicable public opinion. This new burst of humanitarian sentiment was no mere abstraction. By the 1790s, it would begin to lead to concrete moves to limit the Atlantic slave trade – the British ended their involvement in 1808 – and to abolish slave systems outright in a growing number of societies.

108 Protoglobalization Along with abolitionism, a number of Western philosophers began to talk about the “rights of man,” potentially implying that people everywhere, on the basis of their common humanity, should share certain freedoms, such as the right to choose their religion or freely express opinions. The ideas were enshrined in revolutionary political documents, like the American Declaration of Independence which declared that it was “self-evident” that “all men were created equal” and “endowed with certain inalienable rights.” The idea of a common humanity was clearly setting the basis for the kinds of arguments about basic human rights that would become a major feature of globalization later on. For the later 18th century, however, it is important not to overdo. Anti-slavery sentiments did not quickly sweep over the entire world. Racism and other deepseated prejudices complicated any vision of common rights. The high-sounding principles of the American revolution were not in fact applied to most of the African-American population. Advocates of political rights within Europe often believed that people in other societies – such as India – were too backward to manage this kind of freedom, at least without a long period of Western tutelage. The new ideas developed in Western societies at the same time as growing nationalism and new phases of imperialism created mutual hostilities and prejudices among various peoples, even within Europe itself. Still, the emergence of a first idea of certain global rights – the French Revolution of 1789, after all, would also proclaim the “rights of man” – was an important step. This added to the transition between the phase of globalization launched in the 1500s and the surge that would blossom after 1850. Change #3: Expansion of European Manufacturing Capacity and Early Industrialization We have seen that the establishment of the trans-regional network around 1000 had among its several effects a concerted effort to reduce dependence on valued imports by developing more home-based capacity. Thus, Arabs learned how to grow their own sugar. Thus, Byzantines and Arabs alike introduced a silk industry to diminish reliance on goods from China. As Western Europe gained a growing global role after 1500, it quickly learned that there was profit to be made in exporting finished products and importing cheaper foods and raw materials. Initially, Europe’s contributions in this regard depended heavily on the export of guns and clocks to a number of world regions, along with artisanal products for the upper classes in places like the Americas and Russia. Europe also encountered, however, the superior manufacturing capacity of several Asian societies, and gradually but logically its businessmen sought to reduce dependency by expanding local manufacturing capacity. A key example involved India’s printed cotton cloth, which was already a valued item in trans-regional trade before Europeans began to muscle in. For a time after 1500, as they became more familiar with Indian products, European

A Late-18th-Century Transition  109 businessmen and firms like the British East India Company were content simply to organize the export of Indian cloth, making considerable money not only in European markets but also elsewhere with the colorful fabric. Along with Chinese silks, but for a less opulent consumer segment, Indian cotton became a definer of fashion. By the 17th century, however, some manufacturers were beginning to realize that there would be even more profit if Europeans could cut out the Indian producers and not only sell but also produce the goods themselves. By the end of the century, European governments were also becoming concerned about the amount of money flowing out to India, and they began to pass laws limiting the permissible level of imports. This provided another spur to local manufacturers. But the European imitators faced several problems: the experience and artistry of Indian artisans were hard to match, and so were their low wages. Over time, the solution was the use of more machinery to cut costs, while producing a competitive fabric. The turning point was in the later 17th century when a number of factories were set up in Switzerland, France, and elsewhere; there were over a hundred dye and print shops in Holland alone. Increasingly complex equipment was set up to do the printing, reducing the need for as much skilled manual labor. By the 1770s, use of copper plates and then, within three decades, rotary printing machines completed the process of converting an import staple to a leading domestic product. All of this was, as suggested, in one sense a standard result of global connections and competition; it had happened before and would happen again. In this case, however, the size of the consumer market and the fact that Europeans not only copied others’ methods but increased the mechanization involved had larger consequences. The response to Indian cotton became part of the early industrialization process in Western Europe, which was clearly underway if not in the 1750s at least by the 1770s when the first steam engines applicable to manufacturing were being introduced by James Watt in Scotland. While the first decades of industrialization did not immediately alter basic globalization processes – though they did advantage British industry at the expense of traditional manufacturing not only in India but in Latin America and elsewhere – the revolution would ultimately have transformative effects. Here was another way that developments after 1500, encouraging further innovation by the 1700s, helped generate the next true phase in the uneven march of globalization. The relationship between the first decades of the industrial revolution and the existing framework for globalization was somewhat complicated. In retrospect, there is no question that industrialization, one of the great world-historical changes in human life, would require massive changes in global relationships. Already in 1800 – again in retrospect – European and particularly British manufacturing technologies were outstripping levels in any other part of the world, by an increasing margin. Indeed, some historians have labelled the process a “Great Divergence,” in which Europeans began to surpass Asians systematically – in

110 Protoglobalization part by taking advantage of their global commercial role and their colonial networks, which Asian countries lacked. By the first decades of the 19th century, the results began to emerge in world trade. British factory goods, particularly textiles, began to pour into markets in India and Latin America, displacing tens of thousands of traditional manufacturing workers, including many women. In turn, demand for commodities production intensified. British thirst for raw cotton pushed up output in the American South, in Egypt, and in India. British urban markets supported massive surges of grain imports from Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe. Global specializations, and inequalities, clearly increased in the process. There was still some limits, however, which is where the complexity comes in. Other parts of Western Europe, plus the new United States, began to join in the industrial revolution only after about 1820. Asian leaders would start to understand the implications of the Great Divergence only around 1840 – this was the point, for example, when Europeans forced open Chinese markets (though particularly for opium, not factory goods yet), and when the Chinese balance of payments began to become unfavorable for the first time. Above all, it was only in the 1840s that dramatic changes in transportation and communication began to match the revolution in manufacturing, which would at last bring the industrial revolution to bear more fully on the basic frameworks of globalization. Conclusion Innovations and accelerations in global processes after 1750 were interesting and important, but for the most part they extended the durable shifts in global relationships that had developed from the 1500s onward. Global consumerism, efforts to enhance the European (and particularly, the British) role, increasing attention to the Pacific, and the idea of a more global humanitarianism were important developments. The industrial revolution would provide the motive force for dramatic changes in world trade and global technology, once it took fuller hold. But for several more decades, the basic patterns of protoglobalization, taking shape from the 16th century, persisted as well. The protoglobalization period, embellished by the late-18th-century transition, unquestionably set up conditions for further change – as had been the case with the reverberations of early globalization. International companies might readily seek new ways to increase their profits: it was in the late-18th century, for example, that managers in the East India Company discovered that they could make additional money selling Indian-grown opium to China, and ultimately this would contribute to a far-reaching change in China’s relationship to the global economy. (American merchants began to buy opium in the Ottoman Empire to sell to China soon after this, adding to new pressure.) These developments set the basis for a new and dramatically unfavorable global position for China, which would obviously contrast with the patterns that had characterized

A Late-18th-Century Transition  111 the protoglobalization period. The importance of new global trade routes provided obvious motivations for more decisive innovations in transportation technologies, which could shorten carrying times around the world, another shift that began to gain attention in the early 19th century. Historians use words like “inevitable” cautiously, but it can be argued that the implications of the systems launched in the 1500s did indeed generate conditions that would ultimately birth another decisive phase in the globalization process. The decades around 1800 moved the transition forward, without yet breaking decisively with the characteristics of protoglobalization. The debate over the place of the late 18th century should not be forgotten. Claiming too many basic turning points in the emergence of globalization can easily become silly or unmanageable or both. But it is always challenging to try to figure out when intensification of trends shifts into a larger pattern of innovation. Scholars who see this point as more decisive than, say, 1500 deserve attention, which is where the debate comes in. What is the evidence involved, and how is it best assessed? Further Readings C.A. Bayly, “‘Archaic’ and ‘Modern’ Globalization in the Eurasian and African Arena, ca. 1750–1850,” in A.G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History, pp. 45–72 (New York, 2002); Juergen Osterhammel, Niels Petersson, and Dona Geyer, Globalization: A Short Introduction (Princeton, NJ, 2005); see also Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 2012). Diego Olstein, A Brief History of Now; The Past and Present of Global Power (London, 2021). Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor vs. Slavery in British Emancipation (New York, 2002); Peter N. Stearns, Global Outrage: The Origins and Impact of World Opinion (Oxford, 2005). Thomas Benjamin, The Atlantic World (Cambridge, 2009); Sven Beckert, The Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014); Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World (Cambridge, 2013). Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ, 2021); Peter N. Stearns, The Industrial Revolution in World History (5th ed., New York, 2021).

Part IV

Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 The middle of the 19th century, around 1850, give or take a decade, saw the beginning of what was arguably a decisive new phase of globalization – indeed, perhaps the most decisive of all, dividing modern from premodern globalization patterns. To be sure, 1850 is not a commonly emphasized date in world history more generally: textbook coverage almost always emphasizes a “long 19th-century” period running from the late 18th century until about 1914, based primarily on the industrial revolution, the impact of the Atlantic revolutions and independence wars, and expanding European imperialism. The idea of a major break around 1850 has not been a prominent alternative. Correspondingly, there is less literature on this as a new global period than is true for early globalization, protoglobalization or (as we will see) contemporary globalization after 1945. Alfred Eckes Jr. and Thomas Zeiler, emphasizing the growth of world trade and growing United States involvement, make a persuasive case for the emergence of a new period from an American standpoint, with emphasis as well on the accelerating expansion of international trade. Historians of Japan routinely note the importance of the 1850s and 1860s in transforming Japan’s approach to the world. Two economic historians, Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, offer a major defense of the centrality of 19th-century globalization, arguing that it was only at this point that world trade reached enough size and complexity really to generate much global competition or to have major effects on most ordinary people. Before this, they contend that global trade was more superficial, mainly involving exporting one regional specialty (like spices) to other regions. Now, however, globalization would see many regions become involved in more complicated patterns of economic interaction. Recently another major treatment of world history, by Diego Olstein, also argues for singling out the mid- to late 19th century in part because of the distinctive role of British global power, before its gradual retreat by the early 1900s. The contention that the mid-19th century saw the advent of a major new phase in globalization jostles some established assumptions. It challenges those global historians who have paid more attention either to earlier or to later turning points, at least to consider this less familiar candidate. More obviously, it DOI: 10.4324/9781003439615-10

114  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 breaks into the standard emphases in the world history field concerning the long 19th century, with their focus on earlier political revolutions and British industrialization, and then imperialism and the reactions it provoked, plus the growing rivalries among Western nations that would ultimately lead to World War I. Of course, the insertion of globalization, in the midst of all this, does not ignore these more standard emphases. Indeed, Western imperialism played a vital role not only in organizing but also in distorting key aspects of modern globalization, and World War I takes on additional importance in facilitating new objections to globalization. The industrial revolution is central as well, but the “modern globalization” angle emphasizes that it took several decades, into the mid-19th century, for it to redefine global relationships, despite the earlier intrusion of British factory imports into India and Latin America. The argument for a mid-century onset of modern globalization does more than readjust familiar data. It also highlights a number of significant developments that are downplayed, even ignored, in more standard world history account – like the implications of trying to insist that the whole world agree on the measurement of time, or of beginning to exchange meteorological data among different regions, which had never been done before. Even a humble innovation, such as the arrangement that allowed letters and packages to be routinely mailed from one country to another, gains new attention with this globalization lens. The kind of modern globalization that opened up in the 19th century features one other vital adjustment: the need to balance the familiar emphases on trade and technology with the realization that globalization was now extending to vital cultural and political domains as well. Technology and trade still came first, and indeed their transformation helps define the new phase in the first place. But they quickly had wider consequences. Chapter 7 that follows lays out the overall case for the mid-19th century as a turning point, basically contending that it was at this juncture that the industrial revolution, though still disproportionately based in Western societies, really began to have a global impact. Trade levels and complexities are a good measure. Revolutionary developments in transportation and communication, with steam-powered shipping and the telegraph, really created unprecedented opportunities by increasing the speed and volume of contacts. Migration patterns began to change, not only involving longer distances (for example, Asians to the Americas and the Caribbean) but seeing some migrants go back and forth in large numbers. The extension of globalization to additional facets of human life was at least as important. Cultural globalization clearly began to extend beyond missionary religions, with the increasing globalization of sports interests a prime example. Gender was affected in new ways: international feminist organizations, if still a bit tentative, started the vital work of asserting global standards that should apply to women everywhere, and there were some signs of real impact. What might be called political globalization saw the emergence of an array of new

Modern Globalization, 1850–1945  115 international organizations and agreements, affecting basic features of life like patent protection for novel inventions or the new standardization of global time zones. As always, the new phase of globalization involved a variety of regional responses. During the later 19th century, it became impossible to opt out entirely – in contrast to the greater regional flexibility during protoglobalization. By the same token, the process was Western-dominated, with most of the major initiatives coming from Western Europe and the United States and most of the economic benefits flowing that way as well. Other regions had to determine their own approach, to the extent that they were free enough from Western imperialism to do so. Probing regional responses and differences is one of the key challenges in dealing with this period of globalization, and some of them would have significant implications for the future as well. Finally, the modern phase of globalization saw a significant retreat in the decades after World War I – the subject of Chapter 8. A number of countries pulled away from the global framework, without, however, destroying it. Some of the results would help explain why, after World War II, there were concerted efforts to define yet another pattern of globalization that would avoid some of the liabilities of the modern phase. Attention to the decades of partial global retreat highlights two other points. First, it emphasizes the extent to which the long history of globalization must not be seen as some sort of inevitable march from one level of coordination to another. The process always involves human decisions and policies, not predetermined destinies; the decades of retreat emphasize how these factors must be addressed. Second, a new global retreat has arguably been occurring since the second decade of the 21st century – our own time. Understanding the previous modern retreat offers a benchmark against which current developments may be better assessed. Modern globalization was not, of course, entirely a novel development: it built on the patterns established during protoglobalization, and recognizing continuities along with changes forms part of the evaluation process. Among other things, some of the prejudices developed in the previous period continued with considerable force, though new ones were added as well. Correspondingly, modern globalization must ultimately be compared with what would come later: has contemporary globalization outstripped its modern predecessor in fundamental ways or was the advent of the modern phase the most decisive shift? Further Readings Thomas Zeiler, “Just Do It! Globalization for Diplomatic Historians,” Diplomatic History 25 (2001); Alfred Eckes Jr. and Thomas Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century (Cambridge, 2003); Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century

116  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 Atlantic Economy, reprint edition (Cambridge, MA, 2001) and “When Did Globalization Begin?” European Review of Economic History 6 (2002); Juergen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Munich, 2009); Diego Olstein, A Brief History of Now: The Past and Present of Global Power (London, 2021); Abbenhuis Maartje and Gordon Morrell, The First Age of Industrial Globalization: An International History, 1815-1918 (London, 2020).

7

The 1850s as Turning Point The Birth of Modern Globalization

In 1902, an American banker, Frank Vanderlip, embraced a German economist’s statement about what we might call globalization, emphasizing how the perfect and instant communication between distant parts of the world, the cheapening of transportation, the wider knowledge of every country, its products and its needs, have brought about an interdependence of nations that is now almost as great as the [domestic] dependence of one class or industrial workers on another. Nine years later – though this seems misguided in retrospect, with a huge world war about to occur – a British peace activist claimed that global relationships made major conflict increasingly unlikely, arguing that “international finance has become so interdependent and so interwoven with trade and industry that … political and military power can in reality do nothing (as) … the problems of modern international politics (have become) profoundly and essentially different from the ancient.” Again, the parallels with contemporary global optimists are intriguing. Despite the passage of a hundred conflict-ridden years, is this all part of the same scene? A Novel Choice? Thomas Zeiler puts the case this way. Admittedly, late-20th-century changes, particularly in technology, have accelerated globalization’s pace beyond anything visible 150 years ago. But in terms of basic alterations in transportation, new business networks, and economic relationships, the real movement to globalization began earlier. The movement was “nascent and incomplete,” and it was “interrupted by events of the twentieth century”: “but movement existed, nonetheless.” Zeiler sees patterns taking shape before World War I as the “early era of globalization.” It was fueled not only by new steamships but also the two great world canals, Suez (1869) and then Panama (completed in 1914), which sped commerce around the globe; and also by real breakthroughs in communications, DOI: 10.4324/9781003439615-11

118  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 with telegraph lines between the United States and Latin America and Europe, and British cable lines to Asia, allowing faster commercial interactions and exchanges of news than ever before. Great world’s fairs, beginning in London in 1851, highlighted Western manufacturing, to be sure, but with growing attention to economic and cultural patterns in other parts of the world. “Global connections shrunk the world itself” – precisely the claim made about globalization more recently. And while Britain played a vital role, other regions gained new attention as well. Global worries about Asian competition – defined in the words of the German Emperor shortly after 1900 as a new “yellow peril” – and the first stirrings of concerns about cultural and economic “Americanization” also accompanied these changes. This chapter will amplify these claims, and add others, noting changes in patterns of immigration and travel, the onset of new kinds of global connections in popular culture, and a really new era in political globalization with the emergence of capacities to define global standards in a number of areas – beyond anti-slavery – and the formation of international conventions on a host of crucial topics. We will also, of course, deal with limitations in globalization’s “early era” – because the global processes common today were not fully sketched. New Technologies and Systems Transportation and communication formed the most obvious break between the protoglobal patterns of the previous period and the global thrusts by 1850. Capacities for speed and volume in transportation followed from the application of industrialization’s steam engine to both land and sea, with trains and steamships, respectively. Communication was revolutionized through the telegraph, particularly when undersea cables moved the telegraph from a regional to a global device. The new technologies became obviously desirable, of course, because of the levels of global interaction already in effect through protoglobalization and with early industrialization – it seemed increasingly imperative to accelerate their speed. But the changes were so dramatic that they immediately supported a new level of connection, most obviously in trade but also in patterns of immigration, in the dissemination of news, and in other areas. Steamships were developed early in the 19th century, but they had no initial relevance to globalization. The focus was on coastal trips and travel along rivers, mainly for mail or to carry wealthy passengers. Early steamships used paddle-wheels, which allowed them to reduce dependence on wind but which were very vulnerable to rough seas where they could submerge or rise out of the water altogether, damaging engines. Heavy engines improved capacity, but they stressed the boat itself, often separating planks and causing leaks. Fuel use was high, requiring frequent coaling stops, another obvious barrier to global impact. (The first trans-Atlantic effort in 1818 had revealed the problem, as the ship, trying to reach Boston from Bristol, England, ran out of coal and had to finish the

The 1850s as Turning Point  119 trip under sail.) A regular trans-Atlantic service was established only in 1838, from Liverpool to New York, but the operation remained tentative. Only in the 1840s was the first steam shipping company, the Cunard lines, organized to handle regular trips between Europe and North America. Initial gains in speed came in fact from a new, sleek sailing ship, the Clipper, developed by Americans but applied not only to transatlantic routes but (by the British) for rapid transit from Asia to Europe, by which spices and teas could be rushed to market. Travel time was dramatically reduced, though the clippers were fairly quickly outperformed by improved steam vessels. Globally competitive steamship operations depended on several changes which began to accumulate by 1850 or soon thereafter. Use of steel instead of wood provided a firmer basis for the engines themselves, largely eliminating leakage. Even more important was the replacement of paddle-wheels by screw propellers from the 1840s onward. This eliminated the problems posed by rough seas as far as continued motor function was concerned, and also allowed the development of larger and more powerful engines. By the 1870s, more efficient engines, called Triple Expansion Engines, were introduced for ships, allowing steam to be used three times before being turned back by the condenser into fresh water for the boilers; and designs for the boilers themselves improved, permitting higher steam pressures. This meant that ships could travel far longer distances before refueling, effectively elevating steam shipping over sails for any activity requiring speed and/or high volume. By 1900, steamship routes crisscrossed all the major oceans, linking all the inhabited continents with unprecedentedly dense contacts. The reductions in time of travel were immense; transatlantic crossings, requiring a month early in the 19th century, were down to little more than a week by 1900. Costs dropped as well, facilitating both commerce and passenger travel whether for business, or tourism, or migration. Other technological changes added in: by the 1870s, refrigerated containers enabled fresh meats and other perishables to be shipped long distances, allowing places like Argentina or New Zealand to become meat suppliers almost literally around the world. Trains, pulled by steam engines, also played a role in this surge of globalization. Transcontinental lines began to be completed by the 1860s, allowing movement from Atlantic to Pacific in both the United States and Canada, and a bit later linking the Pacific coast of Russia to the Baltic Sea. The greatest impact of trains involved domestic transportation, of course, but long-distance linkage was an important facet as well. Trains and steamships alike also began to open interior regions to growing global trade and contact. Steamships, for example, allowed riverboats to move upstream in places like Africa and China, which facilitated European military penetration but also encouraged trade. Many rail lines were built to do little more than link internal production regions to coastal ports in order to facilitate exports. Virtually all of Africa’s railroads, constructed under European auspices,

120  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 had this function; there were virtually no lines connecting different parts of the continent to each other. Coastal connections stimulated greater production of export products like coffee or vegetable oils, and also minerals. Similar patterns emerged in many parts of Latin America. The result, obviously, stimulated the production of foods and raw materials, which tended to depress prices through growing competition and, in the process, increased global economic inequalities vis-à-vis the industrial nations. Here was a massive downside of the globalization process, exacerbating trends already visible in the previous period; but globalization, in all its chronological phases, has always brought problems of equity and adjustment in its wake. Communications technology entered the overall mix in new ways, adding an important element to the infrastructure of globalization. Effective invention of the telegraph, in 1837, both in Europe and the United States, led within 30 years to trans-ocean linkages among all the continents except Antarctica. Links between Asia and Europe took shape in the 1860s – the Indo-European Telegraph Company, for example, was chartered in 1868, connecting India to Russia and Germany as well as Britain, with routes through Persia – and telegraph connections between Australia and Europe were completed in 1871. Information, admittedly in small, coded chunks, could now range more widely and rapidly than ever before: what used to take months was now a matter of seconds. News about market conditions, including price changes, began to flow via the telegraph. So did items for the press, and soon news combines developed – like Reuters, in Britain – to funnel this news widely, creating a novel breed of international reporters. Costs of transmission tumbled. In 1866, when the first transatlantic line opened, the New York to London rate was a hundred dollars for ten words – hardly a wide-open invitation. Just 20 years later, thanks to growing international competition, the price had dropped to 12 cents a word. As the British poet Rudyard Kipling put it, writing of the deep sea cables: “They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father time … Hush, Men talk today o’er (the oceans) And a new Word runs between: Whispering, ‘Let us be one!’” This was only the beginning, of course. By the 1890s, though at first slowly, international telephone connections started to emerge, and radio communications also added to the mix. The inventor Guglielmo Marconi introduced wireless radio connections across the Atlantic in 1901. The range and speed of communication were intensifying. Amplifying technology, for transportation and communication alike, was the impact of the great new canals, which obviated the need to sail all the way around Africa, in connecting Asia and Europe, or later around South America in connecting both East Asia and the Pacific regions of the Americas to the east coast of the United States or Latin America. The Suez Canal, linking the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, was first out of the blocks. Egyptian pharaohs had long before used a canal to connect the Nile River with the Red Sea, but this had fallen into disuse and obviously had narrower functions. Napoleon, invading

The 1850s as Turning Point  121 Egypt in 1798, thought about a canal, but his engineers discouraged him. The project was revived by a French engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps, in the 1850s, who won approval from the Egyptian government and chartered a French company to fund the work, which was carried out between 1859 and 1869 by teams of Egyptian workers. The resultant canal was 101 miles long, utilizing a few intermediary lakes but requiring no locks because the sea levels at both ends are approximately the same. The effective distance between India and Europe was cut in half; from China to Europe by over 25 percent. The Canal was an immediate success and has continued to provide huge service to global trade ever since its opening. Always intended in principle to be free to the ships of all nations, the Canal long operated under British oversight, which was reluctantly ceded in the late 1950s to Egyptian authority. There have been very few issues of freedom of passage, and the link has periodically been widened and deepened to accommodate larger vessels. The Panama Canal project began, after several false starts, around the end of the 19th century. Spanish conquerors, aware of how much extra time it took to get precious cargos from the Pacific coast back to Spain, projected a canal across a narrow part of Central America in the 16th century, but nothing ever happened. European interest revived in the 19th century, and the growing development of the United States west (including the California gold rush of 1848) increased interest in cutting transportation time as well. Another French company under de Lesseps took up the project in the 1880s, but by the 1890s the United States government assumed a dominant position, maneuvering control over a newly created nation, Panama, and completing the canal itself by 1914. (The connection was administered by the United States until an agreement late in the 20th century arranged to grant control to Panama.) The canal cut 18,000 miles off a journey from the United States Pacific coast to the eastern seaboard, saving at least ten days’ travel and greatly reducing costs, and over time proved vital in connecting Asian exports to United States markets as well. As with Suez, the canal demonstrated a new and intense interest in reducing transportation barriers, and of course it had the effect, along with the innovative shipping technology, in accelerating global contacts still further. Toward Freer Trade and Imperialism Key changes in policy added a final element to the framework for globalization in the later 19th century, though admittedly with some complexities. Headed by Great Britain, major European powers, and more hesitantly the United States, moved toward a pattern of reducing tariffs on foreign goods, on the assumption that freer trade would ultimately benefit all participants. Britain began turning toward this policy in the 1830s, confident in its competitive power as the world’s first industrializer. Other major countries held back a bit, for example in trying to protect local farmers from too much competition

122  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 from the cheap grains of North America; but there was a general interest at least in reducing barriers. The second component of this policy shift involved the military power European and United States imperialists began to apply to other countries toward opening their markets more fully. East Asia was pried open in a series of military confrontations. A small group of Western forces pushed China to allow more international trade and penetration, beginning with the first Opium War of 1839. The specific goal was to prevent China from limiting sales of opium produced in India, which British traders used to win new profits and as a new means of paying for desirable Chinese goods (the great British East India Company had a huge stake in this struggle); but the larger outcome of this and later clashes was to provide new opportunities for foreign merchants generally to engage Chinese markets and even set up production outlets. The arrival in 1853 of an American fleet in Edo (Tokyo) Bay, in Japan, followed by other British and American visits complete with threats of force, had a similar impact in pressuring Japan to allow foreign commercial activity. Korea also opened up in the later 19th century, while European imperial conquests in Africa brought new levels of foreign contact to the interior of that vast continent. Imperialist pressure was double-edged, of course, in that the Western nations fiercely rivaled each other for the upper hand. New Western colonial holdings were hardly free zones for all potential global traders, for each imperial power tried to reserve the best pickings for its own nationals. And while resistance to imperialism within areas like Africa or India was difficult, given the superiority of Western weapons, many people resented Western controls and, understandably enough, often extended their hostility to international contacts more generally. Chinese leaders, similarly, long tried to keep international involvement to a minimum because it was so closely associated with Western controls and the hated opium trade. Even in Japan and Russia, which on the whole adapted somewhat more successfully to the new context and avoided outright colonial status, there were many who wanted nothing more than to reclaim a separate identity and opt out of the global arena. Rivalries and hostilities, in other words, severely qualified the embrace of the new global technologies and policies. Nevertheless, Western assertiveness, backed by new levels of military force, did produce clear change in the second half of the 19th century compared with the patterns of early modern protoglobalization: it was literally impossible, now, for any large region to isolate itself from international trade and international visitors. Impacts of the new speed and range of contacts, and the more open or forceful policies that compelled interaction, affected a wide variety of human activities. Trade and migration, both staples of trans-regional contacts already, took on additional contours and greatly expanded in volume. Diffusion of foods, diseases, and technologies was also affected, though again a number of vigorous patterns had already taken shape. International business organization moved well beyond the levels of the earlier international trading companies. There were

The 1850s as Turning Point  123 newer elements as well: a definable set of international political organizations entered the global arena for the first time. Suggestions of a new, global popular culture also emerged. A new surge of imitations was another crucial product of this launch of globalization, with formal student exchanges an important, and novel, component. These developments all made vital contributions to the ascending spiral of globalization, and in combination they helped to define how this global level departed from all previous precedents. But they all depended, as well, on the technologies and policies that simply made moving goods, people, and information around the world easier than ever before. Trade and International Business The main purpose of improved transportation and related policies involved enhancing global trade, though there were some military goals as well in this age of imperialism. The role of trade in globalization was not, however, simply a matter of volume. Government and popular receptions changed as well, and the 1850s mark a key departure here. It was in 1851 that the British opened the first of the great international trade expositions, the Crystal Palace exhibition in a specially designed, modern glass building. The exhibition touted its role as a display site for industry from “all nations of the world.” In fact, strong emphasis rested on Britain’s leadership in industrial achievement and on materials from the growing British Empire – which automatically gave it great global range thanks to participation from places like India and Australia. But other nations did display, with the United States for example showing its new harvesting equipment. And many tourists from major European cities visited the exhibit. The precedent was established for international gatherings that would showcase technology and consumer products in a cosmopolitan atmosphere, while giving various nations opportunities to strut their stuff. From the 1880s onward, beginning with an exhibition in Paris, world’s fairs occurred about every 5 years, particularly in European and United States centers, creating great fanfare for the idea of a global (but Western-dominated) economic community. Levels of global trade reached unprecedented dimensions, with virtually all regions actively participating. Indeed, as economic historian Kevin O’Rourke has argued, the mid-19th century might be seen as the launch of modern globalization simply because of the magnitude of world trade growth. Between 1870 and 1900, the shipping tonnage available virtually tripled. The total value of all exports and imports, worldwide, quintupled between the 1850s and 1900, virtually doubling again by 1914. British exports soared by 57 percent between the 1870s and 1900, but Britain’s share of world trade actually dropped, as Germany, the United States, Italy, and other societies began to get into the game, aided by the spread of steam shipping and the benefits of access to the canals. United States exports thus grew by about 200 percent between 1879 and 1914. African involvement in world trade increased, despite the end of traffic in

124  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 slaves, as new transportation facilities helped move products like vegetable oils into the world market. Australia’s reliance on exports and imports expanded steadily. Russia, already a major exporter of grains and raw materials, added petroleum by the end of the century, as shipping of energy products ramped up. Overall, world trade expanded by an average of 4 percent annually in the last half of the 19th century, a mark never before achieved; increasingly, as well, domestic economic performance depended heavily on the expansion of global activity. Additionally, commerce was supplemented by the economic impact of various kinds of services provided internationally. Big banks, particularly from Europe and the United States, steadily augmented their holdings in other countries. European investment in the United States, for example, grew steadily, providing much of the basis for huge developments like the transcontinental railroads. British capital invested in the United States quadrupled between the 1870s and 1914. Trade in modern weapons played an important part in this explosion of trade, greatly extending the export of guns that had figured in European exchanges with places like Africa in the previous period. Sales of artillery and repeating rifles to the empires of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, for example, increased greatly. The United States became a major weapons supplier, particularly after the Civil War – many of the weapons used in civil strife in Japan in the 1860s, for example, came from across the Pacific. Between 1865 and 1870, 1.5 million American rifles were sold abroad. Germany extensively supplied the Ottoman Empire, while German and French firms, along with those from the United States, competed for sales to Latin America. China became a major importer of artillery, particularly from Germany, as well as small arms. Sales of warships also expanded steadily, with each improvement in firepower quickly registering in exports. Growing international trade of various sorts fueled the expansion of international companies. While the overt political role of major companies did not rival the heyday of the trading companies of the 16th–18th centuries, economic power in many ways increased. There were two major developments. First, large companies now set up supply bases in a variety of nonindustrial areas, often acquiring huge local influence in the process and at the same time expanding international sales operations for their finished products. Vertical integration, in other words, saw Western firms establish large mining or agricultural holdings in places like Latin America and Africa, while at the same time maintaining branch sales offices for their finished products in many other parts of the world. In some cases, the results were very similar to what had occurred with the earlier trading companies. Thus, the United Fruit Company, from the United States, founded in Boston in 1899, within 7 years had acquired a hundred square miles of banana lands in Colombia, Cuba, and various parts of central America, employing 15,000 people; it operated rail lines and shipping companies, and strongly influenced the politics of governments in the region – often now called

The 1850s as Turning Point  125 banana republics; it even operated three radio stations to expand its influence. In the process, bananas, as late as 1870 a luxury item, became a household staple in the United States and elsewhere. Deals with local governments kept labor unrest at a minimum and wages low; a Guatemalan dictator routinely sent troops in at any sign of trouble, while also giving the company tax breaks and railway rights, while the Company in 1910 simply overturned a Honduran leader who had refused similar concessions. The second development, in many ways even more novel, involved setting up production plants in various parts of the world, taking advantage of technological knowhow while seeking to squeeze out potential local competitors and also reducing shipping costs. Singer Sewing Machine Company, for example, founded in the United States in 1851, began to go international in a big way in the 1860s. The company opened a branch sales office in Hamburg in 1863 and built its first foreign factory in Scotland 4 years later. It quickly discovered that having different production sites allowed the company to ride out particular economic and political pressures in specific regions – Singer’s European production thus sometimes was used to compete directly in the United States, for example to blunt the demands of labor unions. By 1871, Singer’s British plant was the largest factory in the whole country. A new facility in Podolsk, Russia, set up in 1902 also quickly became one of the largest industrial operations in the nation. The company carefully managed multinational patent filings in order to protect a steady series of technical improvements, thus beating back local competitors. Manuals and catalogues were developed in a host of languages as Singer essentially organized a global change in the way ordinary families as well as manufacturing shops produced and repaired clothing. By 1929, the company had nine factories worldwide, with 27,000 employees outside the United States. This kind of production expansion, with major impact on local economies and consumer patterns, constituted a clear step beyond what international companies had previously ventured. Expansion of trade, banking, and international business had an inevitable corollary: the emergence of international economic trading crises. Traditionally, economic oscillations, which could be quite severe, had depended on regional factors, notably bad harvests, and while these could spread beyond national boundaries, they had only limited global repercussions. By the later 19th century, this pattern was changing. First hinted in a short downturn in 1856, and then more extensively in 1873, economic crises now typically resulted from speculative overinvestment by banks (often headed by firms in the United States): this resulted in a withdrawal of credit and shrinking levels of global trade, which in turn led to drops in production in both nonindustrial and industrial regions and a growth in unemployment. The pattern easily extended not only across national boundaries but across oceans. From this point onward – and the great depression of 1929 was only a particularly severe example – economic crises always embraced both Europe and the United States and usually had significant impact

126  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 (or sources) in falling trade levels, both exports and imports, in Latin America, key parts of Asia, and other regions as well. Consumerism, finally, reflected the new trade levels, beyond the expansion of the types of food available. “Oriental” rugs and furnishings became increasingly popular in middle-class homes in the United States and Western Europe, based on production mainly in the Middle East. With new Japanese production, silk stockings became more widely available by the end of the century. Museums and private collectors gobbled up stuffed animals from all over the world, creating something of a new global business; world’s fairs almost always featured new displays. This was the period also when, under Western imperialism, art objects were pillaged from many parts of the world, particularly Africa and the Middle East, creating an increasingly cosmopolitan experience for many Western urbanites. Migration Levels of migration exploded in the later 19th century. The sheer amount of human movement added to overall globalization, even though migration as a phenomenon was not new at all. Furthermore, and not surprisingly given new population pressures and the new means of transportation, distances traveled by many migrants expanded substantially. Increasingly migration meant a dramatic and rather sudden mixture of disparate cultures. Finally, again thanks to new transportation, a good bit of migration was now transitory, with significant numbers of immigrants returning home either briefly or permanently. This also altered the nature of migration, and provided new influences back home that had never before been common. Millions and millions of people emigrated from the 1850s until World War I (when the flow understandably dried up for a while, not only because of war but because of economic dislocation and new regulations). The period formed the most intensive era for this kind of movement in human history to that point. Over 50 million Europeans went to North America, parts of Latin America, and Australia-New Zealand. About the same number of Chinese set sail to the Americas (particularly the Pacific coast regions) but also to Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Thirty million Indians migrated (to various places, including southern Africa and the Caribbean), and there were huge flows from Japan and the Philippines as well (the Japanese, for example, became the largest ethnic group in Hawaii). Middle Eastern migration was less voluminous, but merchant communities moved out to Africa and Latin America from places like Lebanon, and there was some Turkish labor migration as well. Population pressures at home, new opportunities in industrial or commercial-agricultural regions, but also the active work of industrial recruiters help explain this huge flow. Railroad and metallurgical companies from the United States, for example, sent agents out to places like Eastern Europe looking for cheap labor, and there were few national

The 1850s as Turning Point  127 regulatory barriers to interfere. Many agricultural and mining operations signed people up on indenture contracts, now that slavery was abolished, setting up contract periods of 7 or more years and often transporting whole families in the process. This was a key basis for the movement of Asian workers to the Caribbean and parts of Latin America. Obviously, the same data that show massive numbers also show huge distances, the longest ever for migrations that were at least partially voluntary. The movement of Asians to various parts of the world was striking, a major break with Asian tradition (at least, over distances of this magnitude) and a huge change in population composition and cultural interaction in places like the United States or Peru as well. New racial animosities were stirred in the process, as fears about labor competition were now supplemented by active distrust of so many apparently different cultures and habits. Chinese in the United States, for example, were often accused of encouraging prostitution and red light districts, as well as other undesirable behaviors. New movements of Jews to additional parts of Europe and to the United States helped stir a surge in anti-Semitism. Globalization now depended heavily on unprecedented population mixing and the kinds of tensions that could result. New levels of migration, plus the new transportation facilities, also help explain new patterns of migrant returns. Some groups, to be sure, were content in their new locations or too poor to do anything about it. But other groups now exercised judgment as to how long they wanted to stay, and when cultural unfamiliarity or hostile prejudice or a reduction in available jobs made the host settings turn sour, they simply went home. In 1908, when the United States produced its first data on the subject, 70 percent of all immigrants from the Balkans and 53 percent of all those from Italy headed back home after a few years. The phenomenon was fascinating. Obviously, immigrants in other periods may well have wanted to go home but simply could not. But it was also possible that the new conditions for immigration, including the long distances involved and the levels of ethnic tension (as well as periodic economic instability), heightened the desire – which now could be acted upon. A Hungarian song in the United States thus noted America is not my native country, I never had a happy hour there; I have wandered a great lot, But my heart became all the more bitter …. Tuesday morning I went on a ship, I return to beautiful Hungary; God save America forever, But just let me get out of there. Some long-distance migrants now never intended to stay, but simply to make money for a few years and return to family back home – again, the possibilities for various motives and plans had never been more abundant in the immigration field. But the pattern of return migration actually could amplify globalization, rather than qualify it. For many return migrants, even those who had hated their

128  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 experience, often brought new ideas and cultural patterns back to their native villages, affecting (and sometimes annoying) people there who had never had a thought of change. Some returnees showed off their wealth, which locals could find unpleasant – in one German neighborhood, a village section built on a hill was called “Amerika” because its residents looked down on everyone else. Others, however, displayed a new kind of informal democracy, challenging established status hierarchies. Behaviors of this sort, admittedly diverse, could be quite influential in an otherwise traditional community, linking it in new ways to more global patterns. Overall, levels of migration, but also the new complexities forged novel ties among different regions of the world, making migration an instrument as well as a product of the new level of globalization. Tourism and Travel A brand new entrant to formal globalization involved the emergence of organized international tourism. Obviously, travelers (including religious pilgrims) had played a key role in illustrating and furthering earlier phases of globalization, but the idea of extensive recreational travel by ordinary people rather than heroic pioneers or selected elites, particularly beyond a single region, was a crucial innovation. The phenomenon opened literally in the 1850s. A decade earlier a British cabinetmaker, Thomas Cook, had begun organizing travel within Britain, helping groups like temperance societies sponsor meetings in other cities. He gradually expanded his horizons: by the 1850s, he was setting up travel arrangements to Western Europe, and by the 1860s, this included winter vacation opportunities in Switzerland. In the 1860s also, he and a son visited the United States, and began to include this as a destination. The process also involved a trip around the world, as the Cooks returned from the United States across the Pacific and through Asia – and this world tour became an annual offer from Cook’s tours as well. Comparable developments spread to the United States, though somewhat later: the American Express Company was established in 1850, and as early as the 1870s was facilitating commercial shipments to international destinations, though particularly in Europe; only after World War I did a serious tourist department begin to emerge with global outreach. The vast majority of travel of course remained domestic in the later 19th and early 20th centuries alike. The international destinations that became at all common were hardly global. English middle-class people traveled at least occasionally to parts of Western Europe. A growing number of wealthy Americans, plus many artists and intellectuals, went to Britain and Europe. But, as the Cook’s world tour suggested, there was a trickle of travel that ventured more widely. Ambitious British tourists – not ordinary upper-class people, but not all professional adventurers – began to show up in places like Thailand for tourist purposes by the final decades of the 19th century. A variety of Europeans

The 1850s as Turning Point  129 and Americans were visiting the Middle East for sightseeing and cultural experience beyond the obviously well-established religious visits to the Holy Land. Hundreds of travel accounts were published in the 19th century, often involving descriptions of European visits to the Middle East, Africa, and Asia; and the letters travelers now could send added informally to the sense of connection to different parts of the world. Global tourism did not at this point reach dimensions that would have massive economic impacts, outside of some key European destinations like the Swiss resorts. But some precedents were established that would obviously blossom far more extensively after World War II. Student travel also ramped up. Here was another category that was not new but now involved greater numbers, longer distances, and new destinations. Small groups of students, sometimes venturesome individuals, had visited other regions during early globalization; the clusters of Europeans at centers of Arab learning and the Chinese pilgrims to India seeking more knowledge about Buddhism were prime examples. And their experiences could have major effects in bringing new cultural elements back to their home regions. Now the experience could expand, as individuals in many countries decided to seek knowledge elsewhere and governments in some cases organized programs as well. Tentative explorations, in the first half of the 19th century, were followed by major gains after 1850, along with some signs of institutionalization. European universities were the obvious attraction. German universities gained a well-deserved reputation as centers for innovative research, both theoretical and practical in fields like engineering and agriculture. They drew significant numbers of students from places like the United States, and these in turn would bring back the German model, transforming American universities in turn. Many aspiring American doctors also studied in Paris. By the 1870s, representatives from the United States, France, Britain, and Germany actually got together to discuss a possible organization to help manage international exchanges; and in the same decade the University of Indiana began to arrange summer educational tours to Europe for interested undergraduates. A few more ambitious ventures emerged as well: at the end of the century, a group from Princeton visited Tianjin in China, where among other things they organized the nation’s first athletic association. American missionary activities prompted other ventures. Christian universities were established in Egypt and Lebanon, becoming significant centers and, as American Universities of Cairo and Beirut, lasting to this day. A number of missionary universities were also established in China. Students and intellectuals from other regions were involved. Many Latin American writers and artists spent time in Paris, as did artists from the United States. Chinese students began to venture abroad at the end of the century, as both the government and ambitious young people realized that new approaches were vital to an empire in serious trouble. The government sent an educational mission

130  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 to Germany in the 1870s. When the Chinese reformer Sun Yat-sen visited Berlin early in the 20th century, he found about 20 Chinese students, who established an association calling for revolution against the reigning Qing dynasty. A handful of Chinese women were attracted to Wellesley College, in Massachusetts. In 1896, a first group of 13 Chinese students attended universities in Japan, but by 1910 this had grown to several hundred. Handfuls of Indian students began to attend school in Britain. Before 1850, this involved mainly Christian converts plus some would-be doctors. By the final decades of the century, larger numbers were involved, often hoping to advance careers in the British-dominated Indian civil service. The group included Mohandas Gandhi, who decided to pursue law in London in 1888; as with many Asian and African students, this was a difficult decision, and Gandhi had to promise his mother that he would remain a faithful Hindu, eschewing “wine, women and meat” – but the experience proved important in his own intellectual and political development. A trickle of African students also began to seek education in Britain or France, though there were many barriers including the limited preparatory schooling back home. The first Black graduate of the University of Cambridge in England was actually an American, Alexander Crummell, the son of a freed slave, who would go on to a distinguished career advocating against slavery and working in the new African nation of Liberia. Here was one of many cases where the new patterns of student movement proved vital for individuals and major regions alike. Foods, Diseases, Technology Diffusion, and the Environment The opening of a new phase of globalization had less impact on certain key aspects of the human experience than it did in areas like trade and travel, largely because the fundamental framework had already been set in the decades after 1500. An important exception involved a new approach to diseases, initially developed particularly in Western Europe but soon having global reach, that began to alter one of the oldest results of human exchange. And in the area of technology diffusion – not surprisingly, given the force of industrialization – a true global revolution began to take shape. Foods It would certainly be misleading to claim a watershed in global foods. This does not contradict the idea of a sweeping change in globalization levels overall, but it constitutes a reminder that not everything changes simultaneously, particularly when basic relationships had been established earlier. To be sure, trade in food was fundamentally altered, thanks to new shipping, plus the introduction of canning and refrigeration: a wider variety of foods could now be acquired from distant regions than ever before. Argentina, the United States, Australia, and

The 1850s as Turning Point  131 other countries began to export massive amounts of grain and meats, mainly to Europe, while Russian grain exports expanded as well. The impact was to provide more quantities of certain foods, particularly meats, to at least the middle and upper classes; more broadly, dependence on food exports expanded greatly. But these important changes did not alter the composition of daily diets beyond this point. As a result, nothing in the foods arena in the later 19th century really compared with the consequences of the earlier Columbian exchange in terms of the transmission of staple crops like the potato to new areas. There were however a few interesting dietary shifts: global use of the tomato spread, for example. This new world crop had been picked up in southern Europe in the 16th century but had been viewed with misgiving in most other regions. Many Europeans and North Americans for example feared that the tomato was poisonous because it looked like some known poisonous plants. There was also a real problem for upper-class diners who used lead plates, for tomato acid could dissolve some of the lead and actually transmit poison in the process. But these issues – both the misimpressions and the use of lead table wares – were resolved by the 19th century, and from southern Europe the popularity of the tomato spread rapidly. The introduction of pizza in the 1880s and its gradual dissemination from its southern Italian home was part of this process. It was also true that certain cuisines began to globalize. It was in the 1840s that French cooking began to define elegant dining in elite American restaurants along the eastern seaboard. It was after the 1860s that Chinese restaurants began to take hold in the United States. First established simply for Chinese immigrants working on railroad construction, Chinese restaurants gradually began to win a larger clientele, developing foods that would appeal to other Americans, like chop suey, that used Chinese themes but with major adaptation to (blander) regional tastes. The expansion of diverse immigration from various parts of the world had similar impacts in other places. The huge surge of cosmopolitan food options awaited the later 20th century, but the process was launched during this globalization period. Epidemics and New Controls Contagious diseases continued to spread across the globe, as had been the case earlier. Severe cholera epidemics occurred at various points from 1816 onward, with contacts from India and the Middle East to Europe and thence to North and Central America often involved. Influenza was another frequent global traveler, with a huge worldwide epidemic in 1918–9 that, it is now believed, started in China. Several yellow fever outbreaks involved contacts from Africa to the Caribbean and from there to east coast cities in the United States and also to parts of Latin America such as Brazil. As with food, however, nothing as dramatic, or globally significant, as the Columbian exchange marked this new global period.

132  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 The big development in the global disease arena involved not the spread of contagion across borders, but growing efforts at scientific research, medical treatment, and, above all, public health prevention. Research on cholera, for example, identified transmission mechanisms and, soon after 1900, led to successful cures. Even more effort went into sanitation measures in the cities, toward control of sewage, and improved water quality. Together, these various approaches virtually eliminated cholera as a global disease by the 20th century. Medical and public health advances most commonly began in Western Europe, but they were gradually applied in other regions; control of cholera after 1900 thus actively involved its traditional home in India. Western self-interest, aside from any humanitarian sentiment, motivated efforts outside the West itself. Thus, greater public health efforts in African cities were necessary if only to protect Western business and diplomatic communities. Mosquito control was vital to the reduction of yellow fever, in turn essential to protect workers involved in building the Panama Canal. Disease patterns continued to vary greatly in different parts of the world, depending on local environment and also levels of wealth. It remains true, however, that certain aspects of medicine and particularly public health increasingly operated on a global scale and that, in turn, the connection between interregional contacts and the spread of fatal epidemic diseases loosened in this phase of globalization. This was the context in which one of the most intriguing aspects of later 19th-century globalization took shape, though without a great deal of immediate impact. Fears about the spread of cholera from India, to Europe but also to the Middle East, generated new efforts at quarantine and public hygiene in many countries. But purely national responses were obviously inadequate to a disease that knew no borders, and, haltingly, an international component was sketched as well. Reform leader Muhammad Ali, in Egypt, assembled the first international board to coordinate quarantine efforts for ships in transit as early as the 1830s. A more elaborate international conference for coordination occurred in Paris in 1851 and was followed by other periodic meetings on into the 20th century. Much conference time was spent in national wrangling, plus European efforts to portray their society as the superior guide for a disease-ridden “Orient” along with attacks on Muslim pilgrims as purveyors of contagion. Scant agreement resulted at first as individual societies continued their own measures in seeking to prevent epidemics; globalization, here, was still tentative at best. Many travelers, at various points in the 19th century, found their trips disrupted by local quarantine measures, often required to remain in isolation for two weeks or so. Nevertheless, with the involvement of Russia and the Ottoman Empire along with Europe, the idea of encouraging societies to live up to international standards of hygiene and disease control did gain new attention; and a Red Sea Sanitary Service was set up to try to assist Muslim pilgrims to Mecca in order to inhibit contagion. The idea of imposing standard global quarantine requirements on ships, in periods of epidemics, was discussed again in the 1870s, but with no agreement. Still, the whole

The 1850s as Turning Point  133 movement (along with an increasing number of scientific conferences discussing the nature of key diseases like cholera) represented a breakthrough in global thinking, and would lead directly to the establishment of world health services in the 20th century. Here, clearly, the later 19th century launched, however timidly, a vital component of globalization more generally. Spreading Technologies Global change was even clearer in the area of technology diffusion. The tenor of the world’s fairs already suggests how international technology exchange accelerated. Never before had new inventions passed so quickly from one region to another. Of course, there were constraints still. Early in the industrial revolution, Britain tried to prevent its new industrial equipment from being transmitted to, or copied by, foreigners. A few pioneering ventures saw daring French entrepreneurs smuggling steam engine parts out on precarious boats across the English Channel. But secrecy simply did not work: British businessmen and skilled workers poured into other countries looking for chances to set up factories or build railroads, despite official prohibitions. And the British government abandoned its futile defensive efforts by the 1840s. Even after this, of course, individual businesses that jealously guarded secrets, plus patent protection and other devices, could slow technology transmission. And many countries simply did not have the capacity to build some of the more complex equipment, like train locomotives, on their own. Technology levels would continue to vary even in a more global age. Still, designs moved fast, both because entrepreneurs in other countries took up the challenge of imitation and because Westerners themselves brought machines around the world. Within about 30 years after train lines began to be established in Britain, for example, Western engineers were setting up railroad systems in places like Russia, India, and Cuba, and by the 1870s the movement spread to China. Japan, beginning to become an unusually active global participant by the 1860s, provides an interesting example of the new speed of dissemination. By that decade, after only a few years of interaction with the newest Western technology, the Japanese proudly announced that they could build their own steamships. Railroad engines had to be imported still until about 1900, when again the Japanese began to produce their own. Revolutionary new technology was now spreading in a matter of decades. In contrast, as we have seen, it had taken several centuries around 1000 for knowledge of paper production to begin to disseminate widely, though diffusion would accelerate a bit with protoglobalization. Still, the new speed and extent of technology exchange – with innovations spreading in just a few years – constituted a fundamental component of the wave of modern globalization after 1850, and obviously the momentum would carry easily into the 20th century and beyond.

134  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 Environment Not surprisingly, the acceleration of production for global markets greatly intensified the human impact on the environment. The most obvious environmental changes in the decades after 1850 remained regional, with the further growth of industrial cities, particularly though not exclusively in the West. Smoke-filled air and polluted rivers followed from the growth of urban populations and the surging factories. But there was a global aspect of environmental change as well, focused particularly on areas called upon to produce more foods and raw materials for industrial markets. The expansion of rubber plantations in Brazil, for example, worsened soil quality and generated greater erosion, for the trees were extended into terrain not best suited for their cultivation. African environments changed with the intensification of cultivation of vegetable oils, which Africans depended on for global earnings as the slave trade declined. In some parts of Africa – Portuguese-controlled Mozambique, for example – cotton production was introduced into regions where, again, it worsened soil quality and promoted erosion, while also preempting opportunities for traditional local food production. Rapid expansion of tea plantations in India greatly reduced forest acreage, again affecting both environment and customary agriculture. Overall, where in the century after 1750 about 1.7 million square kilometers of forest were eliminated, in the 120 years after 1850 the figure jumped to 4.2 million. Global environmental change still did not affect the whole world – this would await the more recent phase of globalization, in the later 20th century – but regional developments were unquestionably accelerating. The Emergence of Global Political Institutions Global impacts in phenomena like technology and disease were familiar from earlier periods, even though dimensions changed significantly after 1850. At least as significant were areas in which global initiatives took shape essentially for the first time. A crucial case in point was the emergence of what can clearly be identified as political globalization. This took two forms after 1850. First – and this was the newest element – international political institutions and policies began to apply to key areas of the world’s social and economic framework. Global politics here were limited: some of the biggest problems, notably war, thus drew attention but no resolution, and there was no effort at this point to deal, globally, with environmental change. But several important problems were attacked and, in some cases, clearly alleviated. The second aspect of political globalization, already suggested in the campaign against the slave trade that had emerged from the late 18th century onward, was the effort to use the force of the mass press and “public opinion,” along with diplomacy, to press

The 1850s as Turning Point  135 individual governments or businesses for important social reforms across national borders. This aspect of global politics faced even clearer limitations, but it did generate some change. The New Institutions and Policies Institutional innovation took many forms. In 1863, the United States called for an international congress to deal with the problem of mailing letters or packages outside a single country. Up to that point, someone who wanted to get a letter to a foreign nation either had to entrust it to a traveler – the safest recourse – or had to buy stamps from every country through which the letter would pass. This made it cumbersome, at the least, and often effectively impossible to use postal services beyond national boundaries – and this, in turn, was hardly compatible with the needs of an increasingly globalized economic and cultural system, not to mention the growing desire of immigrants to communicate with folks back home. Following the initial discussion, the Prussian (later German) postal minister, Heinrich von Stephan, took matters in his own hands and forged what was initially called the General Postal Union through the Treaty of Berne (Switzerland) in 1874; the name of the organization was changed to Universal Postal Union in 1878, and this still holds true today though the institution now functions as an arm of the United Nations. The principles were simple and clear: all nations agreed to maintain a standard rate for international mail regardless of destination; they pledged to honor the stamps of the nation from which the mail was sent, with the home country keeping the revenues but with the assumption that the balance sheet would even out over the long haul. For the first time, a person could drop a letter in a mailbox in the neighborhood to any country in the world that had a postal service and have a reasonable expectation that it would reach its destination without further effort. This simple measure – so simple that today most people assume the general reliability of international mail service, aside from a few cases of national disruption, without further thought – illustrates the new kind of political discussion that, even in an age of intense nationalism, was proceeding across borders. Initiatives came from the West: the premise was that if Western statesmen could agree on an international program, it would easily apply worldwide. But no single country orchestrated the operation. Most important, this kind of agreement was fundamental to a new level of global exchange. Like the technological improvements in shipping, it both reflected the rising needs for smooth connections, and furthered those connections in turn. Furthermore, the model could easily be applied to other areas. Almost simultaneously with the postal effort, for example, an international convention was forged concerning telegraphy. And the list of practical political arrangements expanded steadily in the later 19th century. In 1883, for example, a Paris Convention on Industrial Property

136  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 permitted citizens of signatory countries to file for international patent protection within 12 months of the original application date. The Convention made the patent and copyright systems of one country available to individuals from any other signatory country: they could file for protection of their invention or work even if they were not citizens. Furthermore, so long as they filed promptly, the initial date of their national filing would be honored internationally, protecting them against a copycat invention introduced in another signatory country a few months after their own. Only 11 countries initially signed the agreement, entirely from Europe and Central America; but the list steadily grew, and today 178 nations adhere to the Convention, with a few others, like Taiwan, though not signatories, honoring its provisions. Even more than with the postal agreement, this arrangement was hardly foolproof: a number of nations, even when signatories, allowed imitation of devices or materials without payment to the inventor or author. But the principle of international coordination, in a fundamental aspect of economic performance, was a huge change, and it did have significant protective consequences. Considerable international discussion also applied to maritime law and the limits of purely national action on the seas or in the exploitation of ocean resources. The same principles were applied, toward the end of the 19th century, to attempts to limit purely national claims on activities in the Arctic and Antarctic. International scientific societies began to take off for reasons similar to the commercial conventions: global coordination became increasingly necessary and desirable. Starting in Europe, statisticians began to discuss common procedures and categories across national lines. An American naval official, in the 1850s, triggered an initial meeting of meteorologists, and this led in the 1870s to an International Meteorological Association, which focused on gathering data from ships and from national weather services to improve basic stores of information and, ultimately, facilitate better forecasting in a domain that, obviously, did not respect national boundaries. Here again were initiatives that have persisted, ultimately folding into larger frameworks for international collaboration such as the United Nations. International conferences also supported the spread of the metric system, from its initial center in revolutionary France. A meeting in 1867 led to a treaty agreement on metric measurements in 1875, initially signed by 17 governments but spreading steadily thereafter. Agreement on international time zones was even more dramatic – another case where growing globalization required new coordination that would facilitate more contact in turn. Railway companies had discussed the need for coordination across boundaries for several decades – for example, in the United States and Canada. This set the stage for an international conference in 1884, in Washington, where agreement was reached on a zonal division for the whole world, with Greenwich, near London, as the base zone. The French dissented for a few years, hoping for a base in Paris, but the arrangement was completed in the 1890s, with imperial administrations signing on for regions like Africa and India.

The 1850s as Turning Point  137 Another ambitious extension of international politics involved attempts to set standards for behavior in war, again developing in the same timeframe as the other innovations in global politics. In 1859, a Swiss-Italian banker, Henry Drumont, became appalled at the lack of medical attention to wounded soldiers, on all sides, during the Italian wars of unification. He wrote a book urging new international standards in this area, which in turn caught the attention of celebrities like the French writer Victor Hugo and the British nurse Florence Nightingale, who began to take up the cause. The French government, pressed by Drumont, extended support as well. The result was the first Geneva Convention, signed in 1864, providing standards for the treatment of wounded soldiers, prisoners of war, and the like. A number of countries, initially in Europe, signed on quickly, modifying national legislation to permit the application of these international standards. And the roster of signatories, and their geography, expanded steadily; Japan, for example, pledged to observe the Convention by the 1890s. The Convention was closely related to the establishment of the International Red Cross (in 1863) that initially focused on providing medical treatment to combatants but gradually expanded to other humanitarian activities; a corresponding Red Crescent organization, for Islamic countries, followed in 1868. The Convention itself was periodically renegotiated and enlarged – an agreement early in the 20th century, for example, provided standards for the treatment of civilians in war zones; and later extensions tried to limit the use of certain kinds of weapons, as with an early 20th-century ban on throwing projectiles from balloons, or later efforts to prohibit the use of poison gas. Another hopeful effort – suggesting how the goals of global political coordination tended steadily to expand – came a bit later, as a result of discussions that began in 1899, triggered by interest on the part of both American and Russian statesmen. A Permanent Court of Arbitration emerged early in the 20th century, based in the Hague, Netherlands, and designed to help disputing nations sort out their differences without recourse to war. The Court served particularly to interpret disagreements about treaty provisions. Sixteen cases were brought to the Court before 1914, mainly over conflicts over property or debt payments, involving several countries in Europe and Latin America; but the Court also settled outright military clashes between French and German troops in Morocco, and an Italian–French naval skirmish during an otherwise minor war with Turkey. On the other hand, more ambitious plans, including the idea of compulsory dispute arbitration, did not advance, despite some additional international conferences. In the longer run, however, the establishment of the Court provided the basis for even more extensive international legal efforts that developed after World War I, and that produced the International Court of Justice (often called the World Court) and other tribunals. Clearly, growing global activity, in trade and conflict alike, required serious innovations in politics as well. In many ways, of course, the new set of global political agreements and institutions failed to keep pace with actual events:

138  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 efforts to limit war damage, for example, paled before the brutal weapons technologies deployed during World War I. Dispute settlement was important, and the idea of permanent institutions to facilitate the process was truly novel, but it would be hard to argue that greater harmony settled in as a result. Further, even some modest efforts simply failed: discussions about coordinating census statistics, the theme of several European conferences, produced no result because of nationalist disputes. The fact that many of the most ambitious efforts were Western, at least in inspiration, was another limitation. Many countries felt left out of the process or positively threatened by agreements that, for example, seemed to confirm Western advantages on the seas. The fact remained, however, that a global political apparatus was being established, and that it had no real precedent in any previous period in world history. The Emergence of “World Opinion” and Global Humanitarianism The new global political apparatus was not a matter of government action alone. A growing number of international non-governmental organizations (as they are now called, or INGOs) began to form by the 1860s, though with a clearer surge in the 1880s – a bit after the first push for state-to-state efforts, but in the same spirit and covering an even wider range of topics. As with the official ventures, these new organizations assumed that cross-border coordination was essential to promote their goals; national action alone would not suffice. And they believed that there were some common standards, or should be, that had global applicability and that should be sustained by coordinated political effort. Thus, in 1864 Karl Marx formed the first Workingmen’s International, designed to promote labor solidarity (and Marxist principles) across borders. The First International assumed that labor interests transcended nation-states, and that capitalism, itself an international force, needed to be confronted on the same turf. The International initially focused on European and North American unions and socialist parties, and it foundered on ideological disputes within a decade. But a Second International formed in 1889, and the principle of at least some collaboration among different worker groups has been sustained, in one form or another, from that point to the present day, with attention focusing increasingly on global inclusion rather than a largely Western cast. Feminism, another new social force, began to try to go international in the 1880s, though as with labor the more concerted action continued to focus within rather than among individual states. A Swedish woman, Marie Gregg, organized a first International Association of Women in 1868, and during the 1870s a number of international congresses involved delegates from North America and Europe. Three new organizations formed in the 1880s, aiming particularly at voting rights and protections at work but hoping more broadly to mobilize public opinion to “produce the necessary revolutions in the minds of people,

The 1850s as Turning Point  139 the people of the whole civilized world.” As with most such efforts at the time, actual participation was largely Western, but efforts increasingly extended to identify at least individual members from places like China and Iran. The International Council of Women, one of the new groups, spoke explicitly of reaching out to women of “all races, nations, creeds and classes,” while appealing to a “universal sense of injustice, that forms a common bond of union” among “women of all nationalities.” Global organization and membership were not, of course, the whole story here. Equally important to a sense of global politics broadly construed was the expansion of the idea that there were, or ought to be, some globally applicable humanitarian standards, whether the subject was labor conditions, gender conditions, or wartime behaviors: the beliefs that had first inspired the international campaigns against slavery expanded to other topics. Campaigns against slavery continued. The London Anti-Slavery Society, first formed in 1823, was reconstituted in 1839 and called the first world conference against slavery the following year (the Society itself, still operating, is arguably the world’s oldest INGO). The growing chorus of demands for reform, though mainly centered in the West, produced echoes in Russia, with the abolition of serfdom in 1861; the United States in 1863, where sensitivity to European disapproval helped prompt emancipation; Brazil in 1882; a number of African kingdoms under European imperialist pressure, and so on. Efforts would continue into the 20th century, when a growing number of Persian Gulf states began to sign on. And the same kind of humanitarian crusade could now spill over into other reform issues. A British clerk helped organize an international campaign against the mistreatment of African labor in the Belgian Congo. Around 1900, a fierce effort was directed against the real or imagined seizure of women for prostitution in other countries – what was called the White Slave trade. A host of international meetings and grassroots organizations combined to fight the menace. And these definitions of global humanitarian principle were not idle exercises. A new World Purity Federation formed in 1900, and soon there was an international agreement to fight the global sex trade (1904), with an International Bureau set up to monitor. Global outrage prompted individual nations accused of harboring enslaved prostitutions to take action to defend themselves against further international embarrassment. Argentina, for example, often singled out, passed an increasingly rigorous series of laws to prohibit prostitution, hoping to clear the nation’s name from global stigma. Other global (if de facto still largely Western) campaigns mounted against alleged mistreatment of minorities in the Ottoman Empire (first Bulgarians, in the 1870s, and later Armenians). Not only organizations but the new mass newspapers eagerly crusaded against brutality and denial of rights, beginning to establish some force for a world opinion that could motivate actual diplomatic policies. Other targets of new global pressure, often expressed through the judgments of Western observers but then picked up by local reformers, included the foot binding of women in China and veiling in

140  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 Egypt. Here too, a widespread sense might develop that changes in traditional practices were essential to measure up to “civilized” global standards – though the same process could generate reactions in favor of proudly separate identities. Chinese reformers, for example, readily cited foreign (largely Western) standards: The bound feet of women will transmit weakness to the children …. Today look at Europeans and Americans, so strong and vigorous because their mothers do not bind their feet and, therefore, have strong offspring. Now that we must compete with other nations, to produce weak offspring is perilous. In a similar vein, though a bit later, in the 1920s, the new leader of Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, cited global standards in attacks on traditional costumes and headgear, including women’s veiling: “Gentlemen, can the mothers and daughters of a civilized nation adopt this strange manner, this barbarous posture? It is a spectacle that makes the nation an object of ridicule. It must be remedied at once.” Finally, spilling beyond politics, the same kinds of efforts to reach across borders began to generate a new surge of global charity, another unprecedented expression of the intensifying connections among societies worldwide. The very fact of international capitalism motivated some of the leaders of international companies to spread their largesse beyond single countries, particularly by the early 1900s. Andrew Carnegie, a Scotsman who made his fortune in American steel, sponsored libraries in many countries. John D. Rockefeller established a foundation with an explicit global mission – “to promote the well being of mankind throughout the world,” with particular emphasis on medical and scientific research and public health programs, but with funding as well for education and international student exchange. The new Rockefeller Foundation fought yellow fever and tropical diseases in Africa and Latin America, while founding a new Medical College in China. Even aside from big business philanthropy, certain kinds of national disasters, vividly reported in the new mass press, began to call forth giving from ordinary citizens in many different countries. Some of this, of course, translated earlier, transnational ideas about Christian or Islamic charity, but the targets now spread beyond co-religionists to any group singled out for global attention. Global politics and humanitarianism added important ingredients to the process of globalization overall. Though not yet as effective or as consequential as more familiar categories, like global trade, they could nevertheless affect state policy and individual behavior alike. They expressed and furthered a new if fragile sense of unity among different peoples. And of course, they provided a direct inspiration to the even larger array of political and charitable efforts that would attach to globalization later on. Here, without question, a vital new aspect of globalization was born in the later 19th century.

The 1850s as Turning Point  141 Cultural Globalization: Some New Steps Trans-regional connections had often generated mutual cultural influences across political and even religious boundaries. The great world religions themselves had deliberately worked to spread cultural standards, in art and law as well as in spirituality. So the idea of cultural interaction was hardly new in the late 19th century – less novel, certainly, than the emergence of certain types of global political action. Still, a number of developments in several cultural fields suggested a new level of cultural globalization, with the hints of unprecedented global standards in consumerism and entertainment particularly interesting – and often generating institutions to match. Crucial changes took shape a bit later than the first stirring of global politics – patterns began to emerge in the 1890s and 1900s for the most part – which may be an understandable lag in a period when assertions of regional and national identity also gained new attention. But the changes were significant, and they set the stage for the fuller development of global consumer culture and other manifestations in the later 20th century. A host of new examples of trans-regional cultural influence emerged. European artists, striving for innovation, took inspiration from their new access to Japanese and African art in the later 19th century, and this helped forge dramatic new styles like impressionism. Vincent Van Gogh, for example, deliberately imitated Japanese nature paintings as part of his developing repertoire. What began to be called “modern art” was a European product initially, but it had global reference points and would gradually attract artistic interest from other regions. This was what prompted many United States and Latin American artists to flock to centers like Paris to train in the new styles, well before 1900. Many societies began to sponsor study missions to visit centers of science and technology in Western Europe and the United States. As a result, though gradually and with many regional differentials, “modern” science began to shift from purely Western base to a more global cultural platform. Even before the Japanese government made a full commitment to reform in 1868, a number of leaders took study trips abroad. They were particularly interested in gaining technical information – Japan’s capacity to build steamships on its own by the 1860s resulted from this imitation – but they acquired other guidelines as well. The Japanese who visited the United States struggled to understand political institutions like the American Congress: it seemed odd to have such partisan dispute in the halls, followed by signs of friendship among the same politicians after hours. Relatively egalitarian treatment of women, at least by Japanese standards, also seemed strange: one observer noted that Western women seemed to receive the deference Asians granted to the elderly. But other signals, beyond the purely technical, resonated more positively. Future educational leaders like Fukuzawa Yukichi began to argue that Western approaches to teaching and knowledge were superior to Confucian traditions in two crucial respects: the importance granted to science and the willingness to cast aside past wisdom

142  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 in light of new discoveries. When Japan turned to education reform in 1872, it quickly imported a number of Western authorities, including a Rutgers University faculty member, to head up its educational operations, turning away from this degree of dependence only after a decade. Japan was a particularly eager provider of study missions, but other societies began to sponsor inquiries as well, as in the willingness of the Chinese government to support some study abroad. The result was an increased flow of scientific and technical information, but also access to other ideas. Several leaders of republican China, after the 1911 revolution, had trained in the West or Japan, and while they hoped to avoid certain Western features, like some of the social tensions associated with the Western version of industrialization, they were enthusiastic about democratic ideas. Western educators themselves, including Christian missionaries, began to make a special effort to reach out to women as well as men. But cultural globalization also went well beyond student and policy levels, reaching wider ranges of popular behavior. Particularly important, both at the time and in terms of implications for the future, were the new foreign influences on popular consumerism and leisure. Between the 1850s and 1900s, a number of major cities began to imitate the Western department store (which had originated in Paris a few decades earlier and spread quickly in Europe and North America). Russian department stores opened in the 1850s, catering of course to the wealthy but offering an unusual profusion of goods and styles, mainly imported from the West or developed along Western lines. Department stores in Tokyo and in Western-influenced Chinese cities like Shanghai, by 1900, featured Western goods and also musical and artistic offerings often involving foreign styles. Not everyone was attracted, of course, even when they had some money to spend. Many Chinese and Japanese long shunned the department stores as foreign implants. But there was growing influence nevertheless. Western clothing styles, even more broadly, began to compete with local fashions, because they seemed more “up to date” and in some cases because they were more practical – safer, for example, than flowing robes when people were working around new machinery. Japanese enthusiasm for other specific products, like tooth powder, showed a similar openness to items and habits that were beginning to become global. After the Japanese government adopted the Western system of time, in 1872, proclaiming it the “only civilized” standard, the Japanese became enthusiastic importers of clocks and watches as well. Sports as a Lead Item in Globalization The globalization of sports clearly began in the later 19th century. This involved the spread of games from one region to the next – mainly from Western centers outward. It built on a growing popular passion for imported sports,

The 1850s as Turning Point  143 forming implicitly global audiences around deep new enthusiasms. And it involved international organization as well. And while many facets of globalization would recede for a time after World War I, sports globalization accelerated through the 1920s until the new threats of war temporarily interrupted the surge in the later 1930s. Thus, the modern Olympic games were launched in 1896 under the impulse of a French enthusiast, Pierre de Coubertin, who saw sports as a source of international harmony. Greece had revived the Olympics several decades earlier, but on a purely national basis. De Coubertin boasted that the first new games, held in Athens, were “modern” – highlighting competitions like track and field and bicycle races – but also “international and universal.” In fact, the early Olympics were almost exclusively Western – with athletes coming from Europe and North America. Even more than most of the early global organizations, this one long harbored a tension between international statements and a rather narrow regional focus. But the principles were important, and obviously over time the Olympics would greatly expand its global potential. Specific sports interests, however, were initially more important than the Olympics movement in the effective global arena. Tennis, for example, began to fan out from Britain in the 1870s – the first game was played in the United States in 1872. Davis Cup competitions among nations (initially, just Western nations) began in 1900. The Wimbledon tournament quickly opened to international players, and also provided a clear opportunity for standardizing the rules of the game on an international basis. Boxing globalized from the 1870s onward, as part of gaining greater respectability as a sport – though here too, global did not initially mean everywhere. Wide agreement on rules emerged at this point – the so-called Marquis of Queensbury rules, that required gloves instead of barefisted fighting. Boxers themselves began to travel widely. Exchanges among the United States, Britain, France, and Australia were particularly important, but other sites developed as well. By 1914, before the world war broke out, literally hundreds of boxers were traveling long distances for matches. From the United States, African-­American boxers were particularly global, seeking a fairer reception abroad than they could count on at home. Global sports journalism was part of the process as well: hundreds of reporters, again from many countries, covered key matches, particularly in the heavyweight division; 300 were present in Reno, Nevada, for a classic match between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries. While Western involvement predominated, there were some interesting countercurrents. Promoters began to spread judo from Japan, and here too increasing international agreement established standard rules across boundaries. Jigaro Kano, the main promoter, toured the world 12 times between 1889 and 1938, to promote his passion. Two sports, however, were particularly important as they spread out from their initial homelands toward more global participation and audience. American

144  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 baseball, emerging in the United States by the 1840s, began to gain popularity in parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, and also in Japan, by the 1890s, with extensive amateur involvement and spectator interest. An American businessman, Albert Spalding, whose company produced key equipment, toured the world in 1888–9, to solicit wider interest in the sport – an early example of connections between global sports and global business that would steadily deepen over time. More strikingly still, British football – known in the United States as soccer – began to gain attention in the wake of British colonial and business expansion. Groups of expatriate British amateurs, mostly businessmen and diplomats, began playing soccer in Argentina in the 1860s, for example. Upper-class Argentineans soon followed suit, seeing status in this exciting foreign pastime. By 1900, interest was spreading more widely, toward popular participation and spectator enthusiasm. National leagues were established, in many parts of Latin America and, soon, elsewhere, and international competition began as well. Major teams in Argentina, for example, played counterparts from Uruguay and Brazil, to growing audiences and (as one Brazilian woman put it) the “roar of the crowd’s enthusiastic applause.” By 1904, an international federation (FIFA, or in English the International Association Football Federation) was established to oversee the game globally, with headquarters in Switzerland. National leagues continued to spread beyond Europe into the 1920s, by which time virtually all major regions were actively involved. Latin American associations, formed from 1912 onward, gained increasing voice in FIFA, though amid some nationalist disputes, during the 1920s. Uruguay actually hosted, and won, the first World Cup match in 1930 (their team had defeated Switzerland in a classic match in 1924, displaying a distinctive style in the game). Also in these decades, some Middle Eastern and Asian associations joined in. An Algerian team proudly wore green and red shirts, “the color of Islam and the favorite color of the Prophet” – though some international issues arose about scheduling matches during the holy fasting month of Ramadan. Only sub-Saharan African presence was missing, to be added after World War II. Along with geographical expansion, increasing attention to international codification not only of rules, but of referee behavior, began to take hold during the 1920s. Never before had a single game captured such widespread, and often passionate, global attention. Never before had sports played such a significant role in world history. Movies and Popular Culture Soon after 1900, finally, but as part of the same basic global cultural current, the new medium of motion pictures emerged, allowing international sales of entertainment packages produced in a few major centers. European films quickly won some export interest, but by the 1910s it was Hollywood that emerged as the clear global center of the movie industry. Even before World War I, it was

The 1850s as Turning Point  145 estimated that between 60 and 75 percent of all films shown in Britain came from the United States, mainly around cowboy and Indian themes but also with star-crossed lovers and various kinds of desperados. Major American studios set up branch offices in Latin America, South Africa, Australia, and elsewhere, and by the 1920s young people not only in these areas but also in countries like Lebanon began experiencing American film fare as part of their basic recreation. The United States, with a huge national market and the capacity to develop films with wide appeal across specific cultural and ethnic lines, had a clear advantage in this new medium. But Hollywood was never American alone, as actors and directors came from other parts of the world to participate, and often star, in the new genre. At the same time, other movie habits also began to globalize, like the tendency to insist that audiences remain quiet – an innovation in places like the United States that began to spread to the more fashionable movie houses in China by the 1920s. Partly because of movies, but also thanks to other United States commercial exports, observers in some quarters began to identify a current of “Americanization” as part of the global cultural package by the early 20th century. A grumpy British journalist noted how many of his countrymen were eating American breakfast foods, wearing American clothing, using American machines, and even reading American-style newspapers. Several Europeans worried that American “newcomers have acquired control of almost every new industry created during the past fifteen years,” and even bemoaned what they called an American “invasion” or “the Americanization of the world.” But while United States involvement was crucial, and set the stage for even greater influence in the future, cultural globalization was a broader phenomenon, with dissemination from many different sources. The first soccer team in China, for example, was organized in the northern city of Harbin as a result of Russian influence in the city. And it was Russian inspiration in Harbin that also sponsored the first Chinese movie industry, with quick national interest following from this initially foreign inspiration. As cultural influence broadened, all sorts of transmitters could play a role in furthering the process. High culture also continued to show signs of globalization, even beyond the growing international interest in so-called modern art. Shakespearean plays began to be translated and performed not only in Western languages but also in India and Japan. The first symphony orchestra in Japan was established in 1911, linked to a department store. Continuities and Limitations The tremendous innovations of the later 19th century, beginning with the new technologies, make a powerful case for a major new phase of globalization. Without denying the power, however, it remains important to acknowledge both persistent and novel limitations to the whole process. It is also vital to recognize

146  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 that elements of the previous phases of globalization – the developments that had taken shape after 1000 and after 1500 – also persisted amid change; important elements of globalization were not entirely unprecedented. We have seen, for example, that basic patterns of food exchange built largely on the earlier Columbian exchange: while access to additional styles of cuisine was interesting, and while the gains of previously ignored foods like the tomato were significant, the basic work of sharing food staples and domesticated animals had already been accomplished. Nothing in this period compared with the impact of access to corn and the potato several hundred years before. Continuity also included some surprising echoes of earlier commercial networks, along with the fanfare of heightened global trade and new types of international companies. Historians have recently emphasized, for example, how, under the cover of British imperialism, merchants from India extended some of the patterns they had launched almost a thousand years before. Indian businessmen thus increased their contacts with eastern and southern Africa in the period, benefiting from common British control both of India and of colonies like South Africa. British protection and the advocacy of open markets helped Indians expand their trade connections, planting larger colonies of local merchants and shopkeepers in various parts of Africa along with new levels of indentured labor. India’s global role expanded, in other words, despite the brighter glare of British imperial gains, but along lines already sketched in Indian Ocean trade. Continuity most obviously describes many of the key patterns of inequality that still bedeviled world trade in the decades around 1900. The imbalance between Western industrialization and the lack of industrialization almost everywhere else sharpened the gaps, to be sure, but the basic issues were not new. Most of Latin America thus continued to serve the global economy by providing foods and raw materials. The range of products widened, to include new staples like coffee, bananas, or copper, and of course formal slavery was abolished; but sending out inexpensive exports, with shipping and commerce largely organized by foreigners, while depending on core societies for many manufactured goods remained the basic pattern. The biggest new ingredient was growing foreign indebtedness, as societies that tried to expand exports by borrowing money to build train lines and modern ports found themselves beholden to Western banks in ways that only deepened economic dependency. Many African countries worked hard to replace slaves, in international trade, with new products like vegetable oil, but again the reliance on cheap exports (and in turn on low wages) and more expensive imports continued. The expansion of Western imperialism in Africa, from the 1860s onward, saw even greater pressure to develop raw materials exports, as mining expanded and additional areas were brought into cultivation of crops like cotton. Again, however, elements of the basic relationship of African economies to the global commercial system had already been established. Though regional inequalities were not new, their greater severity constituted an obvious limitation to the patterns of globalization that were now unfolding.

The 1850s as Turning Point  147 Major populations could conclude that globalization harmed their societies, and might seek alternatives. For many people, and many leaders in places like China or Africa, globalization at this point was inextricably intertwined with Western imperialism, and it would prove difficult to sort out the distinctions. Even today, this lingering effect of the period of Western dominance continues to color attitudes toward global linkages. The Rise of Nationalism The most important new constraint on globalization – though linked to regional inequalities and imperialism – was the rise of nationalism. There was irony in this fact, some of which persists in the present day: the very decades in which the intensity of global exchanges increased saw growing commitment to the new idea that each nation had a distinctive (and, some advocates would argue, superior) culture and that each should be served by a separate government. Nationalism in some senses responded to the increase of pressures from the outside, serving as a more modern statement of distinctive traditions and identities; and the fact that nationalism now spread virtually everywhere was itself a global development, however complex. Nationalism was not initially applied to globalization at all. The idea of national cultures and the importance of national political expression began in Western Europe, partly as an ideology of the rising middle classes, who sought more national markets and nontraditional forms of identity. It infused movements like the French Revolution, but was also directed toward problems such as the disunity of the regions of Italy and Germany. Nationalism was an innovation, often inspiring intense passion; it differed from more traditional local, religious, or dynastic attachments. But its global implications emerged only later – mainly, in fact, after 1850. For by the end of the 19th century, significant nationalist movements were arising not only in the West and Latin America, where the phenomenon had begun, but also in India, in Turkey, among Arabs, and increasingly among some African leaders. Multinational empires, like the Ottomans or the Habsburgs, were under growing pressure to collapse into separate, smaller national units – almost the reverse of the globalization process. Western nations divided between the impulse to form international arrangements across boundaries – as with the Postal Union – and the desire to seek every selfish advantage against other national competitors. Global sports almost constantly veered between internationalism and national pride and advantage. Not surprisingly, many features of the globalization process would collapse, at least temporarily, with the violent explosion of national rivalries that constituted World War I. Nationalism and globalization were not always rivals. Nationalists could admit the importance of world trade and other arrangements as part of boosting national strength. In principle, they could tout the beauty of their national culture

148  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 while admitting that other national cultures deserved admiration and protection as well. A tradition of liberal nationalism always emphasized the compatibility between devotion to one’s own nation and support for national expression in other regions as well. This was a basic feature of the kind of nationalism espoused by American President Woodrow Wilson after World War I, as he supported the formation of many new nations in Eastern Europe. But there was, and is, clear tension between these two facets of modern world history. Often, as in the decades after World War I, national interests seemed to require new measures to protect against the forces of world trade or immigration. Schools that taught the beauties of the national culture easily fed the idea that the nation was not only distinctive but superior – as in the belief in American exceptionalism that still organizes many presentations of national history in the United States today. The spread of nationalism was in a sense another global phenomenon – every region had to have its own version. But it was and is a clear complication to many other aspects of modern globalization, as these developed after 1850 and again in the later 20th century. The divisive force of nationalism was compounded, in this period of modern globalization, by the continued impact of racist beliefs in Western society, that supported the spread of Western empires to new regions and argued for the superiority of the White race. During the later 19th century, building on a distortion of the idea of human evolution and the survival of the fittest, a great deal of research was devoted to calculating hierarchies of superiority and inferiority in the human species. “Scientific racism” gave new vigor to older prejudice and affected global relationships in many ways – for example, in the idea that it was somehow not theft for Europeans to seize cherished artifacts from African royalty; or in measures designed to prevent Asian but not European immigration to California in the 1880s; or in the substantial neglect of Japanese representatives at the conference called to craft a peace settlement in 1919, after World War I. Regional Patterns While all regions were involved in many aspects of globalization from the mid19th century onward, clear differences in regional reactions emerged as well. The rise of nationalism might itself help organize and express regional distinctions, but even more was involved – including of course the regional economic inequalities that so clearly deepened compared with the patterns of the early modern world. Regional distinctions were in one sense less sharp than they had been before. No major region could now avoid global involvements. European military and economic pressures prevented isolation. Similarly, no region could fully ignore global cultural pressures – the proud resistance that had characterized, for example, China and Japan through the 18th century could not be sustained. Some accommodations had to be made in domains like science or even Western-style clock time; purely traditional identities had to be modified.

The 1850s as Turning Point  149 Nevertheless, regional responses continued to vary, and in some important cases deliberate policies created significant space even as responses to globalization advanced. Some regions were clearly simply forced into new global relationships without much motivation beyond the threat of exterior military pressure. China, for example, was in this sense clearly a more reluctant global player than Japan and Russia, which faced the same global framework but with more willingness to adapt to some extent. It would take some time, amid many complications, for a more spontaneous global interest to develop in China. Even the United States retained some obstinate parochialisms. It made no move toward the metric system, as this became an increasingly global standard. (The British held out as well at this point, though they would accept the system in 1965 in the subsequent phase of globalization.) While American baseball had some global resonance, North American football, gaining popularity at home by the late 19th century, attracted virtually no interest in other regions – but it became a growing American passion, as opposed to the enthusiasm for soccer that was reaching much of the rest of the world. Some regional responses were essentially involuntary. China, for example, had no choice but to allow more access for foreign trade and foreign merchants, and this would affect many Chinese workers – pressed to offer goods at low wages – whether they were willing or not. On the other hand, some other manifestations of globalization depended on taste. As European sectors developed in the growing port city of Shanghai, for instance, new department stores were established, featuring an array of goods from many parts of the world, including Western styles. But most Chinese residents in Shanghai continued to shop in neighborhood outlets, feeling that they had no time for fancy window-shopping. Further, when asked many noted that “we have nothing to buy there” – the new products were simply not interesting compared with traditional foods and clothing. Again, it would take time, amid variations by individual and often by generation, for new tastes to develop. The same experience described department stores in Tokyo, where many of the older elite stayed away, repelled by massproduced goods, and many ordinary people simply lacked the funds or interest. Globalization could produce some agonizing dilemmas about adaptation, again in many different regions. A Nigerian novelist tells the story – set in the 1920s – of a young man who receives a partly Western education and moves from his village to the capital city of Lagos, where he gets a job in the colonial administration. At one point, his mother dies, back in the village: all tradition insisted that he return to the village for an extended time to perform appropriate ceremonies and set the family affairs in order. But he is busy with an urban, consumer-oriented life, and stays put – to the great dismay of the villagers, who have no interest in new city norms. Egypt provides another case, from the 1890s – still being played out in many parts of the Middle East. New global influences, dominated by Western standards, raised growing criticism of the traditional practice of veiling for urban or upper-class women. A number of Egyptian

150  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 reformers emerged to insist that, in order to meet global standards and not appear backward, women should abandon the veil. But many women did not want this, and new nationalist sentiment might in fact urge a preservation of veiling as an expression of distinctiveness and independence against global compulsion. Japan provides the most interesting late-19th-century case of regional adaptation to globalization without loss of regional identity. After two and a half centuries of substantial isolation from global contacts, Japan was pressed into the new global system by naval intimidation, particularly from the United States and Britain. While some leaders urged resistance, after over a decade of internal strife and debate, the Japanese government decided on acquiescence – and also on a set of reforms that would allow Japan to participate globally without the level of foreign interference that was developing in China or in the various Western colonies around the world. Reform meant political change, to adjust in part to global norms – including ultimately the establishment of a parliament. It meant serious modifications of Confucianism, to highlight the importance of new knowledge and the centrality of modern science. It meant a dramatic new universal primary education system, installed after 1872 and including requirements for girls as well as boys in a society that had been intensely patriarchal. It meant, obviously, new levels of participation in world trade and the beginnings of industrialization, based initially on extensive imitation of Western technologies and business forms. But with all this, Japan’s adjustments included careful avoidance of full Westernization: Japan could be successfully global, and still be Japan. Briefly, in the 1870s, enthusiasm for the West included interest in Western-style individualism, as Americans and other foreigners were invited in to oversee the new school system. This quickly faded, however. A Memorandum for Elementary School Teachers, in 1881, warned against individualism, urging instead loyalty to the emperor and “faith in friends.” Community values, and a combination of nationalism and emperor-worship, were meant to guide Japanese political culture, and correspondingly translations of foreign works on education and the social sciences were now curbed. Reactions to globalization, from basic commitments as opposed to grudging acceptance, to imaginative efforts to combine participation with protection of cultural identity, continued to vary regionally. These divergences would become even more marked after World War I, when opportunities to resist Western-­ defined globalization expanded, and the benefits of the new system seemed in many ways increasingly questionable. The Late 19th Century as Crucible The idea of looking to the mid-19th century as a globalization watershed rests on two main claims, both supported by the revolutionary new global technologies in the fields of transportation and communication. First, sheer acceleration. Levels of trade, numbers and distances involving immigrants, and rapidity in

The 1850s as Turning Point  151 the spread of contagious diseases all suggested major changes in admittedly familiar basic categories. But second, the massive extension of the range of global impacts, to new dimensions of consumerism including sports, to the variety of political and humanitarian arrangements, to tourism, to an emerging global scientific community, even to new evidence of environmental impact. Arguably, virtually all the categories we currently look to in defining globalization today were established, at least tentatively, by 1900. Even the tension between globalization and nationalism, such a hot topic today, can be explored by the late 19th century despite the absence, as yet, of a convenient term for globalization itself. But hesitations can remain. Regional differences were still pronounced. Many innovations, like the attempt to set up global mechanisms for conflict resolution, were tentative at best. Even global technologies can seem surprisingly limited by contemporary standards. Finally, the level of globalization that did exist was about to be challenged by a wave of reaction, particularly during the second quarter of the 20th century. This, too, may raise questions about selecting the later 19th century as the most important global turning point. Further Readings Giovanni Federico and Antonio Tena-Junguito, “World Trade 1800-1938: A New Synthesis,” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History 37 (2019); A.G. Kenwood and A.I. Lougheed, The Growth of the International Economy 1820–2000 (New York, 1999); John J. McCosker, ed., History of World Trade since 1450 (Detroit, MI, 2006); Jonathan A. Grant, Rulers, Guns and Money: The Global Arms Trade in the Age of Imperialism (Cambridge, MA, 2007); Thomas Metcalfe, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley, CA, 2007). Roland Wetzhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization (Cambridge, 1993); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley, CA, 1986); John Adams, Ocean Steamers: A History of Ocean Going Steam Ships (London, 1993); Dwayne Winseck and Robert Pike, Communication and Empire: Media, Markets and Globalization, 1860–1930 (Durham, NC, 2007). Paul Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order (London, 2009); A.G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History (Princeton, NJ, 2018). Akira Iriye, Cultural Internatinalism and World Order (Baltimore, MD, 1997); Krystyan Courtney and John Mercer, eds., The Globalization of Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century (Lewiston, NY, 2003); William Hoffa, The History of U.S. Study Abroad: Beginnings to 1865 (New York, 2007); A. Cooke and others, “When Commerce, Science and Leisure Collaborated: The 19th-­Century Global Trade Boom in Natural History Collections,” Journal

152  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 of Global History 12 (2017); Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870–1950 (Cambridge, MA, 2015); William Mulligan and Maurice Brie, eds., A Global History of Anti-slavery Politics in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2013). Barbara Keys, Globalizing Sport: National Rivalry and International Community in the 1930s (Cambridge, 2006); George Wright, “Sport and Globalization,” Education History (2002); Franklin Fuer, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (New York, 2004). Lynn Withey, Grand Tour and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750– 1915 (Basingstoke, 1998); Mark Rennella, “American Travelers and the Transatlantic Voyage in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of Social History 38 (2004); Kirstin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1902–1934 (London, 1983); Ricardo Salvatore, Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900–1945 (Durham, NC, 2015). Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (New York, 2005); James Hollifield and Neil Foley, eds., Understanding Global Migration (Stanford, CA, 2022).

8

The Great Retreat, 1914–45, and a New Transition

The second quarter of the 20th century demonstrated conclusively that modern globalization, undeniably powerful, was not an inevitable force. A number of new barriers could be erected against it, cutting into cultural and political contacts and even reducing international trade. This was an unusual moment. Resistance to globalization had certainly been a reality in the early and protoglobal phases, but it usually showed up in regional retreats – like the Japanese decision to opt out in the 17th century, not in a sweeping movement of reaction. With modern globalization, however, the system itself was called into question; not dismantled, it was severely limited in many areas, and few governments took much responsibility for sustaining it. Clearly, inevitability is not a particularly helpful historical concept in dealing with globalization – or most other historical patterns – because it glosses over the need for ongoing causation and overlooks important bumps in the road. At a time – today – when globalization is being challenged once again, it is really important to remember a previous point, fairly recently, when a variety of countries tried to unseat the process or at least major elements thereof. One problem, which historians like Diego Olstein have highlighted, was a clear decline of English, or perhaps more properly, Anglo-European power. The world war exhausted and divided Western Europe, to the benefit of countries like the United States and Japan whose governments, however, were not prepared to replace the Anglo-Europeans as global champions. Only later, after World War II, would the United States prove willing to take on a mission of global leadership, for better or worse. It is also important to remember that, even if the late 19th century is the effective seedbed of modern globalization, there were a number of special features that could create vulnerabilities. Sheer novelty was one: Japan eagerly embraced globalization but also displayed many uncertainties, simply because of the tension between innovation and more traditional habits and identities. The problem of nationalism was a new twist: the same period that generated modern globalization also created a key rival and facilitated its spread. The problem of epidemic disease, that constant companion of international trade and travel, DOI: 10.4324/9781003439615-12

154  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 could reasonably generate new limitations. And finally, the Western dominance of late-19th-century globalization often made it almost indistinguishable from Western imperialism. This is why, of course, many societies were unable to resist the new contacts. But it was also a crucial liability, and this became obvious when, in World War I, Western leadership itself began to falter. Globalization’s inevitability, for at least three decades, became less compelling. The Great War and Its Aftermath World War I, not the first global war but by far the most devastating to that point, was a huge blow to globalization because it effectively divided much of the world into warring camps. There were some unexpected new linkages. Soldiers from India and Africa used by Britain and France gained exposure to novel experiences and ideas, among other things learning more about European nationalism and what this might imply for their own countries. New groups of writers from places like the United States had meaningful encounters not just with war but with Western Europe. In the main, however, the war encouraged disruption and new levels of divisive national commitments. Divisions continued after the war, as a variety of societies decided that globalization, or at least key aspects of it, had brought dangerous consequences to regional interests. The United States, reacting to its unexpected involvement with European conflict and diplomacy, pulled back into isolationism, reducing its diplomatic commitments with other regions. New laws also severely limited immigration, reversing the older trends, in a wave of cultural antipathy to foreigners. Larger economic and cultural involvements continued full tilt – this was only a partial withdrawal – but the national mood was not proglobal. Isolationists believed that American engagement with the world during the First World War had been a big mistake, costing lives without advancing national interests, and that the nation was adequately protected by its special geography: it could go it alone, at least in international politics and possibly more besides. Spurred by revolution, the new Soviet Union also rethought globalization. In principle, communist leaders maintained the commitment to the international organization of labor, and indeed formed a new workingmen’s International to spread revolution more widely. But actual Soviet leaders, and particularly Josef Stalin from the late 1920s onward, talked about developing a separate socialist system and pulled away from most international arrangements including basic aspects of world trade. Because so much of the world seemed hostile to communism, it was imperative to carve a separate economic and political path. Cultural influences from outside were also carefully limited. When the Soviet Union would later expand, through its conquests and de facto empire after World War II, it continued to encourage substantial economic, political, and cultural separation from the more general global systems.

The Great Retreat, 1914–45, and a New Transition  155 By the late 1920s and 1930s, new leadership in Japan and Germany also looked toward the formation of separate economic systems to reduce dependence on the Western-dominated world economy. Japan began to carve out a new empire in East Asia and the Pacific, calling it the Co-Prosperity Sphere: the goal was to have sources of raw materials, cheap labor, and markets independent from the larger global system. Japanese leaders were convinced that the West was incapable of treating the nation fairly, as in its exclusion from the inner circles of negotiation for the peace settlement after World War I; and then the global depression furthered the idea of creating a separate power base. Nazi leaders in Germany hoped to use conquests in Eastern Europe similarly to reduce interactions with other societies in favor of a Nazi-dominated empire. Nazi culture deliberately fought international influences like modern art. Other key regions, to be sure, made no such formal moves to set up alternatives to globalization. But in many parts of Asia and Africa, core issues increasingly revolved around nationalist struggles for independence, and while this was by no means necessarily anti-global, it hardly placed a global agenda at the top of the list. Limitation and Persistence Beneath the surface of major events like war, revolution, and the rise of fascism, in other words, a fundamental current in world history for a quarter-century or more involved concerted efforts to modify, replace, or evade globalization. Globalization hardly ended in consequence. Basic global technologies, like the telegraph, were not dismantled. International sports and movie interests persisted. Artistic exchanges continued, particularly in the world of modern art, though the Soviet Union and, later, Nazi Germany, rejected the style. Popular Hollywood movies expanded their global audience, though some new governments, like Soviet Russia, kept them at bay. The Olympic Games continued, though with more bitter nationalist rivalries, particularly at the Nazi-staged event in Berlin in 1936. Global trade and the big international companies continued at high levels of activity, though of course oscillating according to internal economic conditions. Some new nations, like Turkey, vigorously introduced reforms aimed at adjusting local culture, including education and clothing styles, toward more global standards. It was in the 1920s, despite important countercurrents, that several United States universities first established regular study abroad programs – these aimed, to be sure, at Western Europe (particularly France and Italy) but they did embody a basic belief that, even in an age of growing nationalism, exposure to cosmopolitan experience should be a vital part of American elite education. International politics also experienced some vital innovations, extending and ambitiously redefining the types of global politics that had emerged before 1914. The League of Nations, as a deliberative body designed to reduce conflicts, expanded the idea of coordination, and both the League and other

156  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 agencies increasingly, though slowly, opened to non-Western participation. While the League failed to keep the peace, partly because it was given no real enforcement powers, it was a huge step forward in principle toward selective global governance. Older separate agencies, like the International Labor Office (not the communist group, but an organization formed before World War I, designed to encourage better labor conditions across borders and to collect relevant statistics), now became part of the larger League operations, with increased effectiveness as a result. The ILO worked hard to reduce child labor and encourage shorter working hours, around the world. Coordination on health issues improved. International non-government organizations, like some feminist groups, gained in intensity as well, partly because they could now lobby the League for support. The idea of some internationally-applicable women’s rights gained ground. The Soviet Union itself, though largely isolated, encouraged some new global trends. Though the Soviets reduced the Marxist emphasis on worldwide revolution, they continued to claim the relevance of some international principles. Soviet constitutions emphasized the importance of new rights, such as the right of children to have access to education. This put pressure on other leaders as well; Franklin Roosevelt, the American president, would talk of rights to education by the 1940s, expanding the list of what would soon be called human rights. But the dominant trends no longer favored globalization. The League of Nations failed in its largest goals, unable to deal effectively with growing nationalist conflict. In the long run, the League would provide some precedent for more effective international diplomatic and military action of the sort that would emerge with the United Nations after 1945; but it was the failure of the League, as much as its forward motion, that set the stage for later developments. The Great Depression that opened in 1929, although a clearly global phenomenon, pushed most countries to new levels of tariff protection and other selfish measures that actually made the disastrous economic spiral worse than it would have been otherwise. A number of countries, even before the depression, introduced new policies of import substitution, which protected local industries with high tariffs and government subsidies in order to limit dependence on imports of products like textiles and automobiles: this was the policy in Iran and Turkey in the 1920s and in key Latin American countries in the 1930s. The results encouraged new levels of regional manufacturing and could reduce some of the sting of Western-dominated trading patterns, but at least for the moment the innovations were non-global if not anti-global. Thus, in the wake of World War and depression, huge changes emerged in key aspects of globalization. Economic disruptions and the rise of high national tariffs actually reduced the average annual growth of world trade during the decades between the wars from the 4 percent characteristic of the later 19th century to a mere 1 percent.

The Great Retreat, 1914–45, and a New Transition  157 Other innovations dramatically cut into global travel, and here the consequences have lasted to the present day. The post-World War I years saw the rise of modern passport and visa requirements. To be sure, the use of some forms of passports goes well back in world history. Various states had often issued letters to travelers to try to promote a good reception, and basic safety, in other countries. The idea was to help favored travelers, not hinder them. Thus, King Louis XIV of France began to issue encouraging letters to court favorites in the late 17th century, calling them passé ports, because they might help travelers when they reached a foreign port. By 1800, most European countries had developed some passport system, and some tried to require visas of foreign entrants as well. The Habsburg monarchy attempted with some success to regulate travel across its borders from the Middle East, partly to protect against contagious diseases. The United States began to try to register immigrants, though the latter did not necessarily have official papers from their countries of origin. But the system was still haphazard: it was only in 1858, for example, that Britain stopped issuing passports to people who were not British citizens. The United States did not grant the Department of State sole authority to issue passports (as opposed to individual states or private firms) until 1858, and even then many Americans traveled abroad without documentation. In the heyday of immigration and foreign travel in the later 19th century, in fact, what passport system there was totally broke down because of the frequency of travel and the rise of new means of transportation. France abolished passports and visas in 1861, and most European countries followed suit. New hesitations developed in the final decades of the century. Some American states tried to shut out immigrants from Asia. The federal government took over the immigration system in 1890, displacing state policies, and then in 1891 passed a law that specified several “excludable” groups who would not be admitted, including those guilty of “crimes of moral turpitude” or those carrying “loathsome and contagious diseases.” Understandable concern about disease transmission, plus some racist bias, began to cut into the permissive quality of 19th-century migration. It was World War I that altered this permissiveness decisively. Fearful of spies and foreign agents, most European countries introduced strict passport requirements during the war, initially terming them temporary measures. The United States began to try to prevent anyone from leaving the country without a passport in 1918. The rapid spread of what was called the Spanish flu, in 1918–9, which killed millions in many parts of the world, added motivation toward greater regulation. The result was, at the least, a significant complication to the movement of migrants and travelers. When combined with new immigration restrictions, as in the United States during the 1920s, the result significantly reduced the international movement of peoples. Once firmly established after World War I, the idea of the government’s right to prevent unauthorized departures and entries, and

158  Modern Globalization, 1850–1945 the steady increase in the paperwork involved in any kind of international travel, became a significant component of global interactions. The new system did not prevent renewed global networks, but it definitely did not encourage them, and some feared groups of travelers might be totally left out, at least in terms of legal access, in the process. The rise of the modern passport was both a symbol and, at least for a time, a new reality in reactions against the easy globalization of the later 19th century. More generally, World War I had demonstrated the power of governments to introduce new levels of cultural and economic controls, and these could now be deployed against unwanted global influences. Soviet and Nazi measures kept most Russians and Germans away from dominant international styles, despite the power of modern communications technology, using government controls of press and radio and producing alternative movies, artistic fashions, and news. In Germany, Hitler elevated racism and his claims for “Aryan” superiority into a new justification for rejecting global influences and nurturing his plans for aggression. The extensive retreat of globalization does not challenge the idea of the later 19th century as the point of origin of modern globalization overall. Rather, the retreat confirms how much had changed, to the point that, spurred by the disaster of World War I, so many countries now believed that they had to think about how to recover greater autonomy. The larger period 1850–1945, thus, can be seen in terms of the rise of globalization punctuated, in the final decades, by various though incomplete reactions to the contrary. Even with the retreat, several key aspects of globalization remained vastly stronger in 1939 than they had been in 1839. Yet the retreat was quite real as well. One consequence was that, when globalization resumed a forward march, it might seem newer than it actually was, an innovation more than, at least in considerable measure, a resumption of earlier trends. Another consequence was that, after the horrors of depression and yet another world war forced growing realization of the disastrous consequences of some of the anti-global movements like Nazism, many leaders now had a new reason to seek more global solutions, to develop alternatives to the anti-global trends of two really challenging decades. Both aspects, finally, set up the next phase of globalization, a focused resumption of global initiatives after World War II that would finally spill over into a real global torrent, as earlier thrusts resumed and additional innovations added still further range and intensity. Conclusion: Back to Transition In the long run, the partial retreat from globalization during the post-World War I decades is worth pondering for several reasons. First, the reminder that globalization is not simply inevitable, that it requires closer analysis, is really important. Some of new resistance that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s may well crop up

The Great Retreat, 1914–45, and a New Transition  159 again. Second, the decades generated new questions about how certain regions would deal with globalization, and some of these questions persist today. While Soviet resistance to globalization began to fade in the 1980s, and then in many ways disappeared with the fall of communism, the notion of a special Russian relationship to globalization still has applicability. The United States vigorously cast aside isolationism in the 1940s – but the impulse has hardly disappeared entirely. And more generally still, the issue of globalization’s link with Western dominance, though it too has considerably transformed, lingers as well. But the decades of retreat also turned out, somewhat unexpectedly, to usher in a new transition to another globalization phase. For, at least to many, the reactions against globalization proved far worse than the disease. Nationalistic tariffs made economic problems worse. Scorn for global humanitarian standards helped generate the genocidal Nazi offensive against Jews and other minorities but also the lack of effective international reaction. Above all, attacks on globalization complicated effective response to the growing threat of war in the later 1930s, both in Europe and in East Asia. The failures of the interwar years convinced many leaders that a new set of global institutions had to be created, to prevent the kind of collapse that engulfed so many regions in World War II. An explicit commitment to globalization resumed. Further Readings Robert Boyce, The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization (New York, 2012); Tara Zahra, Against the World: Anti-globalization and Mass Politics between the World Wars (New York, 2023); John C. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge, 2000); Diego Olstein, A Brief History of Now: The Past and Present of Global Power (London, 2021); Silvio Pons, The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism, 1917-1991 (Oxford, 2014); John E. Moser, Global Great Depression and the Coming of World War II (London, 2015).

Part V

Contemporary Globalization The Most Recent Phase and Its Backlash Two contradictory historical approaches have benefited from the discovery that globalization has a history and that its dimensions can be better understood through historical analysis. The first approach is the invitation to consider when earlier forms of globalization developed and how they shed light on more recent developments. This has led to a fuller exploration of previous periods, from early globalization on to the later 19th century – the subject of the previous sections of this book. But the second, more dramatic, approach centers on the claim – by historians – that, despite important precedents, “real” globalization is a very recent phenomenon, decisively marking contemporary history off from its long predecessors and making the pre-contemporary past less relevant than might be imagined. “New Global Historians” identify around the twin belief: that globalization is brand new and that its arrival involves one of the greatest changes ever in the human experience. While their enthusiastic claims can be contested, they deserve serious consideration. Needless to say, by implication, their approach downplays the distinctive significance of the “modern” globalization period discussed in the two previous chapters, simply because contemporary globalization dwarfs all previous changes. Thus, Bruce Mazlish, an early leader in the new global history thrust, argued that we should not just think of globalization as the most revolutionary development of the past several decades, but more grandly should accept the fact that humanity is entering a global epoch, as different from previous historical patterns as some of the great geological changes earlier in the earth’s history. Emphasizing the same point, Wolf Schaefer has written of a “second Pangaea” – referring to the time, 200 million years ago, where there was a single massive continent surrounded by oceans; globalization is creating a similar though now intercontinental unity, different from anything people have ever experienced before. The “new global historians” obviously acknowledge that there were earlier changes in international contacts – Schaefer after all accepted the idea of a protoglobal phase – but they do not see them as coming close to the magnitude of contemporary change. To them, recent developments – and Mazlish and Schaefer were quite clear in emphasizing the mid-20th century as DOI: 10.4324/9781003439615-13

162  Contemporary Globalization the turning point – go beyond defining a conventional period of time, involving far more sweeping changes in human life. Seeking to flesh out this far-reaching transformation, the new global historians offer a number of specifics, most of which are mutually compatible but which may also be analyzed separately. They see, for example, the global as a huge step beyond the mere “modern”: modern meant industrial, it meant a new kind of state, and while these were important shifts they differed from the wider-ranging implications of the global and were less significant as sources of change. Thus, Manuel Cassells, a sociologist not directly part of the “new global” group, sees the contemporary world increasingly defined by networks of knowledge rather than the mere emphasis on industrial production, with these networks linked across most sections of the world. He grants that a “world economy” has existed for centuries but urges that a “global economy is something different: it is an economy with the capacity to work as a unit in real time on a planetary scale.” Beyond the economic-technological aspect, new global historians also see globalization as far more encompassing, involving unprecedented international institutions and cultures. Some claim, further, that globalization is increasingly undermining both nation and state, for the process goes beyond conventional political activity. Power shifts to more amorphous forces like communications networks or environmental impacts or to structures like multinational corporations or international NGOs. The globalists point out that at least 52 of the richest entities in the world are multinational corporations, not governments – which means that over 150 nation-states are dwarfed in power and wealth by these economic giants. Meetings like the annual World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland (launched in 1971) bring together international business tycoons, global intellectuals, as well as political leaders, a concentration of power well beyond the reach of conventional interstate diplomacy. Unprecedented globalization even redefines human anxieties and fears – another striking claim about the novelty involved – as people realize that they are surrounded by vast processes and as risks spread to global levels, well beyond the ups and downs of individual regions. And the new global historians urge that unless we turn to the huge changes that globalization has brought to the human experience over the past 70 years, unless we accept that globalization is revolutionizing human life as no mere contact patterns had ever done before, we will not have an adequate basis for shaping the policies and perspectives essential in dealing with the world around us – it’s not just a matter of scholarly accuracy. Several historians, going beyond academic analysis, plead for a new set of global ethics – a new definition of a global citizen – to match and control the changes that they see in organization and knowledge. And while the idea of a new global history was developed before a full grasp of contemporary levels of environmental change, the urgent appeals for an unprecedented global response to meet this challenge are compatible with the basic thrust of the historical claims.

Contemporary Globalization  163 Finally, the idea of a new global pattern has echoed beyond academic circles. In 2005, Thomas Friedman, a prominent New York Times columnist, published a widely noted book on how the newest phase of globalization (which he saw opening up in the year 2000) was making the world effectively flat for the first time. His “flat world” was based on the “inexorable integration of markets, nation states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before.” Chapter 9, which follows, takes up the major innovations in globalization that have occurred since the middle of the 20th century. Whether or not they add up to a revolutionary new phase in the human experience, as the new globalists claim, can, and should, be debated, but there is no question that, at the least, they represent a new stage in modern globalization. However, particularly since the financial crisis of 2008–9, contemporary globalization has also generated a variety of objections and resistances – just as “modern” globalization had done a century before. Revealingly, while the interest in global history has intensified, some of the “new global history” claims have receded a bit, and even Thomas Friedman might admit that it was premature to write a history of the 21st century in 2005. At the least, the recent complications must be added to the discussion of globalization’s most recent phase – and the probable prospects for the future. Chapter 10 takes up the uncertainties of the past two decades, including the unexpected global pandemic that burst forth in 2020. Further Readings Bruce Mazlish, The New Global History (New York, 2006); Wolf Schaefer, “The New Global History toward a Narrative for Pangaea Two,” Erwaegen, Wissn, Ethik, Jan. 2003; Manuel Cassells, End of the Millennium: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Oxford, 1998); Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century (New York, 2005) and The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York, 2000).

9

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s A New Global History?

A globalization guru tells the following story. In 1988, a US government official traveling to Chicago was assigned a limousine with the cellular phone. It was his first experience with the novelty and he was so pleased to have a new communications option literally at his fingertips that he called his wife just to brag. Nine years later, in 1997, the same official was visiting a remote village in Cote d’Ivoire, in West Africa, that was accessible only by a dugout canoe. While he was there, a Cote d’Ivoire official told him he had been asked to contact Washington, and handed him a cell phone for the purpose. And if the same story had occurred another decade later, the official’s own cell phone would have connected with the United States directly, and his children would own cell phones too. The point is obvious, and obviously important: new communication opportunities melted distance and time. People began to be able to reach each other, immediately, around the world. This made the experience of travel different from what it had been previously – one could go a long distance and retain direct connection with family, friends, and work, which meant that travel was less disruptive than ever before. The shrinking of communication gaps, at least technologically, made new types of collaboration possible: scientists for example could work on the same problem in real time (impeded only by the intractable issue of different time zones), almost as if they were next door to each other. Connections among stock markets tightened as news could be exchanged instantaneously. Even student cheating took on new dimensions: students taking an Advanced Placement test in Egypt could use cell phones or email to tell friends in Los Angeles what was on the exam, hours before the Angelenos actually had to take it – until the College Board wised up and began preparing different versions of the exam for different international regions. The implications of new communication speeds were dazzling. Technology was not the only story. As early as 1946, the International Labor Office, backed by powerful maritime unions in several parts of the world and their global federation, instituted an international minimum wage for all merchant seamen, regardless of nationality. Enforcement varied, of course, DOI: 10.4324/9781003439615-14

166  Contemporary Globalization but maritime workers were able to extend the standard by refusing to handle ships from countries that defied the new minimum at national ports – so the international wage did spread widely in this unusual industry. The idea of a single international wage level for an important category of workers would have been unthinkable just a few decades earlier, but now it quietly became part of global life. Policies and organizations, and not just technologies, were creating a new world community, and this also reminds us that the contemporary phenomenon of globalization arguably predates some of the most striking recent inventions such as cell phones, the Internet, and social media, which were called into being in part by new global needs. This chapter lays out some of the major developments that have unquestionably accelerated globalization during the past seven decades. In the process, it allows further assessment of the claims of dramatic novelty. That important changes have occurred is incontestable, even if the current period is seen as the latest phase of a longer process. (This is the argument of others in the growing number of historians who have taken up this topic, like Robbie Robinson who sees recent patterns as the “third phase” of a transformation that began in the 16th century.) The question is how fundamental the transformation, how radical the new directions human societies have embarked upon, compared to previous innovations in global connections. Several other preliminaries must be noted. The first emphasizes the continued importance of regional responses to global forces. Even the most ambitious of the new global historians acknowledge the importance of interrelating local reactions and conditions with the mounting global forces. Indeed, balancing the local and the global is something of a mantra in this approach to history, as “new global historians” like Bruce Mazlish strongly emphasize. Globalization obviously affects and limits diversity, but it does not erase it. Some of the diversity, in turn, relates to continuities from earlier relationships with interregional contacts. There is even a horrible new term that some scholars use – glocalization – to describe the mixture of global and local features, for example in the way some common sports are played with a regional flare or the blend of food styles in cosmopolitan cities. The concept is valid, even if the term is distracting. The next point involves evaluation. New global historians express excitement about identifying the innovations globalization entails, but not blanket approval of the consequences these same innovations bring. They fully grant that globalization creates new problems and worries, even outright protests, and while they do not see the process turning back, they are not blindly optimistic. One can accept the idea of fundamental change, in other words, without assuming that the world is better as a result; or one can insist on greater continuities with earlier phases of global interactions, but again with open evaluation of the quality of the results. Potential debate might surface about exactly when the transformation (or next phase) began, and while the issue is less important than the discussions about the new period’s relationship to earlier stages in the emergence of interregional

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  167 connections, it could warrant attention. Hence, a third preliminary. After all, pinpointing a decade in which new or additional processes began relates to identifying the major causes involved in launching them. Some observers might opt for recency, around some of the most dramatic new technologies such as the Internet (a 1990s innovation) or social media (after about 2004); this was Thomas Friedman’s approach in The World Is Flat. Most historians, however, including the “new global” group, highlight the mid-20th century as the point at which changes in policy as well as technology began to emerge, only to accelerate further, of course, as additional developments like satellite communications or the Internet factored in. There is some complexity here: it was in the same midcentury decades that the Cold War took shape, dividing much of the world along ideological lines, and this is not exactly consistent with the general processes we usually associate with globalization. But many historians believe that basic globalization features developed alongside the Cold War, and they also note that both “free world” and communist sides in that conflict thought in global terms, even as they disagreed about what world they wanted to create. The end of the Cold War in the 1980s accelerated globalization further, but the process was in fact almost certainly already underway. Finally, the relationship of recent globalization to other commonly mentioned processes, notably Westernization or Americanization, deserves comment in advance. Americanization was a phrase much used in the 1950s – a French government official famously referred in that decade to the dangers of “Coca-colonization,” and some of the concerns about globalization more recently have involved other American staples like McDonalds. American cultural as well as economic and military influence certainly plays a substantial role in contemporary globalization, just as Anglo-European power helped shape globalization in the 19th century. The broader process of Westernization must also be considered – one historian saw this as the central feature of the later 20th century, though he wrote before the globalization concept became current. Phenomena such as the global (though not uniform) spread of democracy or women’s rights owe much to ongoing Western influence. But the new global historians tend to downplay the role of this special regional preponderance in the changes they identify, noting for example the increasing place of East Asian societies such as Japan, South Korea, and now China in shaping many of the economic and cultural processes we associate with globalization. One of the new features of this globalization period, indeed, in contrast with the later 19th century, may well be the reduced hold of the West on the basic contours of change. After all, accelerating globalization occurred just as a host of regions freed themselves from Western colonial control: decolonization initially seemed to complicate globalization, by introducing scores of new nations and new nationalisms, but this tension ultimately subsided. More recently, accelerating globalization has built on the rise of China, India, Brazil, and other new manufacturing powers, reducing Western economic as well as political dominance in

168  Contemporary Globalization the world at large. Disproportionate Western influence still has something to do with globalization, but amid important changes and complexities. (But note: the lesser Western role helps explain new concerns about globalization in the West itself, by the early 21st century.) Here, certainly, is a set of issues to be tested along with the broader probes of global transformations themselves: to what extent has the most recent phase of globalization also involved a dramatically different global power structure? The New Framework: Technology, Policy, and Language Developments in several areas combined to set the process of globalization in motion from the mid-20th century onward – or, if the new global history claims seem a bit exaggerated, to re-launch it after the tribulations of the world wars and depression decades. Two categories are familiar enough from the later 19th century – technology and intentional global policies, though they now involved dramatically new features; a third area, language, extended beyond earlier levels. The experience and outcome of World War II established a powerful context for the major changes: this is where the interwar collapse proved to be an unexpected transition. To be sure, the war caused great devastation. It helped lead to the new divisions that underpinned the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States and their respective allies. It hastened the dismantling of the Western empires, which had previously encouraged global contacts of a sort – although it is also important to note that decolonization was itself a global movement, spreading rapidly from one colonial region to the next. Several facets of the war most directly promoted new kinds and new levels of global interaction. First, the leadership position of the United States, even though it was contested, provided an additional spur to new connections – for example, in the growing importance of the English language in international communications. Second, the huge geographical scope of the war – far greater than that of World War I – promoted new technologies that would have implications well beyond the military. New types of aircraft and new communications systems had strong roots in wartime research. Finally, for many parts of the world, the shock of the war, on top of the previous dislocations of the Depression, caused many leaders to rethink earlier policies. American politicians, for example, realized that the fascination with isolationism had caused serious problems. New Japanese leaders, with American encouragement, obviously rethought their relationships with the wider world after 1945, and the collapse of Nazism had the same effect for Germany. Soviet policies became far more internationally oriented than they had under prewar Stalinism. Even more important, leaders from various countries, but particularly in Europe and the United States, vowed to create new international policies that would promote peace and economic growth. The idea of reforming global political structures was a key element in the globalization surge of the postwar world.

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  169 Wartime developments and postwar reactions, in sum, helped develop the context for the newest round of globalization. Transportation and Communication A series of technological developments in the second half of the 20th century accelerated the movement of people, goods, and, above all, information literally around the world. The primacy of communication was striking, but the contributions of global air travel were significant as well, allowing more people to go long distances for business, pleasure, or migration than ever before. Use of airplanes for regular transcontinental travel began in the late 1930s. Before that point, the need for frequent refueling prevented anything but occasional or very indirect, island-hopping flights. Pan American airlines established the first regular transatlantic route in 1939, but the advent of World War II obviously disrupted service. Activity picked up after the war, when the utilization of jet engines greatly facilitated longer-distance flights and at greater speed than was possible with propeller-driven craft. British Overseas Airlines established the first regular jet service from London to Johannesburg, South Africa in 1952. A Convention on International Aviation, designed to help coordinate international flights under the administration of a United Nations Agency, was first signed in 1948. Quantas (the Australian carrier) developed the first nonstop flight across the Pacific in 1965. The effective birth of air travel and freight beyond national borders – staples of global connection today – is little more than six decades old. Yet in those six decades, the volume of global air travel has increased immensely, oscillating moderately according to economic conditions but trending steadily upward. By the early 21st century, almost 100 million passengers in the United States were involved in over 800,000 international flights each year. A modest international airport in Copenhagen, Denmark, handled over 2 million intercontinental passengers each year (more than 10 percent of its total activity), with over half of these heading to the United States, China, and Thailand. Significant numbers of people – minorities of the total populations, but not tiny minorities – were traveling long distances every year, some of them repeatedly. The rise of global air travel had its downsides, of course. The term “jet lag” was introduced in 1966, described as “a debility not un-akin to a hangover.” For the first time in human history, hundreds of thousands of people every year were trying to do business or conduct diplomacy while feeling significantly under the weather even as they simultaneously adjusted to the strangeness of many foreign countries. Of course, experience brought some remediation, as the most frequent world travelers used various coping strategies and, at the highest level, luxurious airline accommodations might cushion the impact. Air travel was not for passengers alone. By the 1970s, Flying Tiger airlines in the United States was running regular package service to six continents,

170  Contemporary Globalization acquiring a fleet of jets in the process. This operation was acquired by Federal Express in 1989. Air transport became a major freight option, allowing perishables, urgently needed items, and legal and business materials to be carried, often overnight, literally around the world. Key innovations in communications emerged during the same decades. Here, however, military needs, during World War II and particularly during the Cold War, provided particular stimulus, with resulting technologies quickly spilling over into more general global contacts. It was in 1945 that a British electronics authority, Arthur Clarke, wrote about the possibility of sending communications satellites into space, among other things to distribute television programs. By the 1950s, various firms were beginning to develop research in the area – one proposal particularly focused on the possible benefits (and costs) of satellites that would be able to carry intercontinental phone calls in far greater volume than undersea cables could. It was the Soviet launch of the first space venture, Sputnik, in 1957 that really spurred activity. The American federal government began to collaborate with several corporations to build orbiting communications satellites. The first successful launches occurred in 1964, with the initial regular network established the year following via the Early Bird satellite. Systems and participants expanded steadily thereafter. Global organization was provided by the establishment of Intelsat, which ultimately combined more than 130 governments and provided communications open to all nations. Individual countries, particularly of course from among the wealthier societies like Japan, Canada, Australia, and ultimately China, Mexico, Brazil, and India, established their own satellite systems as well. The result was a literally revolutionary improvement in the number, clarity, and low cost of international telephone calls, and a brand new capacity to send television signals worldwide. As early as 1964, portions of the Olympic Games in Tokyo were televised to Western Europe and North America. Soon, transmissions from most parts of the world were possible, allowing news, sports, and entertainment to be sent worldwide: audiences of a full quarter of the world’s population for single events like World Cup soccer became a recurrent but heretofore unprecedented cultural phenomenon. On the telephone side, by the 21st century facilities expanded to the point of providing hundreds of thousands of international or domestic calls at any one time, at less than 5 percent the cost of rates in the 1960s. Further, these services were available to regions regardless of levels of industrialization, assuming the ability to afford a cell phone or a television set – hence the West Africa story that began this chapter. Building on satellite capacity was the emergence of the Internet as, again, an international device for the transmission of massive amount of information and a tremendous variety of communications on a global basis. Research on the potential power of connecting computers began in the 1950s and 1960s, both in the United States and Europe; military and civilian sponsorships were concurrently involved. A number of small linkages developed, but the idea of a more

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  171 unified network gained ground steadily. Initial goals focused both on communication and on enhanced information storage and retrieval capacity. Electronic mail opportunities emerged from 1979 onward. International connections were at first limited because of disparate national systems and concerns about military secrecy. By the 1980s, however, greater standardization developed; in 1984 University College London began using Internet capacity to communicate with the United States, with computers talking directly with computers. Australian linkages developed at almost the same time as developments in Europe, and by the late 1980s Japan, Singapore, and Thailand also gained global Internet connections. China introduced its first capacity in 1991. With some external funding, African connections developed from the mid-1990s onward. Clearly, a new global system had emerged with far wider information exchange capabilities, at almost instantaneous speed, than had ever before existed. There were of course limitations to this aspect of technological globalization: poor countries developed links, but with far fewer and less high-speed computers and more frequent disruptions their participation was hardly complete. Other countries qualified their participation by introducing national content filters, a prominent feature for example of the Chinese system designed to limit any oppositional political voices. Various kinds of “digital divides” continued to define this aspect of globalization, sometimes adding to the more familiar global inequalities. Still, with email and the Internet (and by the late 1990s, pioneered by Japan, the ability to connect via mobile telephones), opportunities for personal contact, scholarly and business interaction, and other forms of exchange expanded beyond anything previously imagined in the experience of the human species. Correspondingly, a number of new information services developed global capacity: Google could be consulted in 149 languages by 2023, for example, while Wikipedia had offerings in 290. These developments were extended, after 2000, by the rise of global social media connections. Most social media exchanges were not international, but some linkages did develop. Huge social media companies like Meta (Facebook) enrolled massive numbers of subscribers internationally; Facebook had almost three billion worldwide by 2022, while TikTok had 1.6 billion. This not only facilitated communication, but led to some widely-shared experiences. People in many countries began to share novel habits like a delight in taking and posting selfies. Technological innovation had periodically contributed to trans-regional exchange before, with particularly striking developments of course in the mid19th century. Arguably, however, the new possibilities for moving people, goods, and information rapidly over long distances, and creating new media habits, established a technological environment vastly surpassing any previous precedent. New organizational forms, like the multinational corporation, or the instantaneous human rights appeals of contemporary INGOs or the lures of international terrorist networks, would have been inconceivable without this technological base.

172  Contemporary Globalization Policy Change Two kinds of policy innovation altered the framework for globalization, alongside the connective technologies, though patterns were somewhat complicated by the Cold War. The first category centered on several key new international institutions, and the values and functions they embodied; the second, emerging more gradually, involved crucial national decisions about relationships with global society. Launching the first category, in the later stages of World War II, two types of institutions were sketched, one for world politics, the other for the world economy, both of which followed from the wide desire to find global solutions for the kinds of problems that had torn the world apart in the previous two decades. The economic institutions also reflected the growing role of the United States in world affairs and its commitment to free market capitalism. In 1943, at the height of the war, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China issued a call for a new international organization to replace the League of Nations. A founding conference occurred in San Francisco in 1945, and the new United Nations began functioning in 1946, with headquarters ultimately in New York. It was hoped that the new organization would be far more decisive in resolving conflicts and assuring peace than the League had been, and while the Cold War and later tensions disrupted this goal, the UN did in fact play an effective role in a number of trouble spots, winning agreements to send peacekeeping forces from member countries in many instances. United Nations agencies, assisting refugees, working for disease control, trying to promote economic development or technological cooperation, have often proved even more constructive, constituting a major part of political globalization over the past 70 years. United Nations proclamations, beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and extending to statements on women, children, labor, and other issues, have provided powerful political and humanitarian standards, helping to galvanize public opinion and influence local policies on a number of major topics. Hardly a world government, despite concerns from some critics, the United Nations has provided global influence. It has also served as a forum for the growing number of independent nations, almost all of them outside the West, becoming part of the redefinition of globalization away from almost exclusively Western dominance. Meetings at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 established new institutions and policies to help regulate the global economy and prevent the kinds of instability that had marked the decades between the two world wars. The main goal of the conference was to win agreement from each participating country to maintain the exchange value of its currency in relationship to the price of gold (or, after 1971, the US dollar), in order to prevent incapacitating fluctuations that could disrupt international trade and domestic economic performance alike. Two specific institutions resulted in addition, the International Monetary Fund

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  173 (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which later essentially became the World Bank. Both organizations established voting rights for member nations, based on levels of economic contribution. The basic idea was to assure a free flow of trade and a commitment to collaboration in economic matters to prevent the kind of selfish national separatism that had clearly exacerbated the Depression. The IMF helped oversee the stability of exchange rates while advising countries on policies that might affect the international monetary system. The organization also had a fund that could provide loans to members to cover temporary trade deficits, while insisting on the adoption of economic policies it found suitable in return. What became the World Bank had the more straightforward task of providing investment money to help in postwar economic recovery (particularly in Europe) and, later, to aid developing nations in accelerating their economic growth and occasionally to provide debt relief; the Bank also assisted in educational development, particularly at the university level. International discussion also focused on tariff levels, with various agreements on lowering rates in the interest of freer trade from 1947 onward, and with another new institution, the World Trade Organization, ultimately set up in 1995 to encourage and monitor the process with even greater vigor. The result was hardly smooth sailing. A number of countries held back or were not admitted to the international organizations because of seemingly illiberal economic practices. Disputes over items like agricultural tariffs – where industrial nations tried to protect farming groups by limiting entry of foods produced, often more cheaply, elsewhere – were recurrent, and a number of international meetings ended in failure. Still, the effort was unprecedented and it had some obvious results. A number of countries, like China (admitted to the WTO in 2002), undertook significant reforms in order to participate fully in the global trading system. This kind of global economic organization and policy had never before been attempted. Its global reach was imperfect, however. The communist bloc did not initially participate. Many developing nations, and other critics, argued that the new funds were excessively under American control (an American, for example, always headed the World Bank) and unduly committed to free trade policies that interfered with local goals and often operated to the benefit of the industrial regions (particularly the West, but also Japan). While massive depression was avoided, periodic regional crises continued and certainly the funds did not manage to lift all areas up into sustained growth. Nevertheless, the effort to reduce the impact of regional problems on the larger global trading framework was real, and clearly differentiated this stage of globalization from the immediately preceding decades. It was revealing that when, in 2008–9, an unusually severe financial and economic crisis hit the world economy the leading nations (not now just the West, but rising stars in Asia and Latin America) actually sought to strengthen the IMF as a means of limiting national isolation and providing new levels of global financial monitoring.

174  Contemporary Globalization Other international organizations gained strength as well. For example, Interpol (International Criminal Police Organization), which had been founded in 1923 but taken over by Nazi Germany in the 1930s, gained renewed voice after 1945. The organization coordinated police activities among member states, sharing data bases and playing an active role in dealing with crimes, such as terrorism or sex trafficking, that cross national borders. Other organizations sprang up after the postwar formative period: for example, the International Criminal Court was set up in 2002 to prosecute people accused of war crimes and other atrocities, extending the idea of building capacity to enforce global standards. The Court did take up several major cases, for example for ethnic cleansing killings during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, though it also encountered considerable resistance. The second type of policy change unfolded more gradually, but it involved not only reversing some of the isolationism that had developed earlier in the 20th century but also promoting levels of international engagement that were in some cases unprecedented. As noted, the United States, Japan, and Germany moved away from earlier policies quickly after the war and became leading players in world trade and other global interchange – qualified only by some lingering suspicions of the former Axis powers. China underwent a massive shift in orientation in 1978, when communist leaders, though eager to preserve a separate and authoritarian political system decided to embrace the world market and to open to unparalleled interest in hosting international visitors and in sending students and others abroad, with the broad goal of learning as much as possible from the rest of the world, and particularly from the industrial leaders. By 2015, 300,000 Chinese were studying abroad. Never before had so many Chinese traveled so widely, and never before had the nation welcomed so many visitors, even as China’s role in the world economy and in other global sectors, such as athletics, expanded rapidly. Almost as dramatic was the decision by Russian leaders in 1985 to develop a more market-based economic approach and a more open political style, which also led to new levels of international exchange. The fall of European communism in 1989–91 destroyed most of the barriers between eastern and western Europe, including the Berlin wall, and embraced virtually the entire region in active global interactions. Even Albania, long isolated even within the communist bloc, soon joined the parade. By the early 21st century, only a few countries, notably North Korea and Burma (Myanmar), stood apart from active international engagement, including extensive trade and travel, and by 2015 Myanmar opened up to greater trade and tourism as well. Other major regions had clearly decided that the costs of isolation, including missing out on the latest technologies and participation in potentially profitable world trade, were simply too great to bear. Never before had such a largely voluntary embrace of the importance of globalism occurred. The contrast with the 19th century, where imperialism and Western military pressure had literally forced many countries into global contacts whether they wanted to or not, was striking.

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  175 New policies and institutions committed to the free flow of goods and funds, new national involvement in internationalism of various sorts, set a policy context for globalization that was almost as significant as the technology revolutions. Indeed, the inquiry into faster means of communication was in part a response to the opportunities unleashed by policy change. The combination was powerful. Language: Global English The spread of language had always been both a barometer and a facilitator of wider exchange. The extensive use of Greek in the eastern Mediterranean, well beyond the native Greek-speaking population, was a key example in the classical and post-classical periods. Arabic, fueled by the rise of Islam and Arab-led trade, probably came closest to a status of world language, during early globalization; but obviously many regions were unaffected. During the colonial and imperialist eras, both Spanish and French spread widely, along with English. Always, language dissemination reflected the military and economic power of the linguistic source, and sometimes larger cultural prestige as well, but it could also facilitate wider contacts in trade and culture. These same factors fueled the global spread of English in the decades after World War II, but now the whole world, and not just an extensive region, was embraced. Earlier British imperial status and now the global surge of the United States explained why English was the global candidate. But it was the growth of new levels of interchange – the needs of a new phase of globalization – that explained why a common language was increasingly required for businessmen, athletes, scholars, and others. And the spread of English in turn became a major factor in enhancing other aspects of globalization, completing the framework that decisively emerged in the late 20th century. The globalization of English began with responses to some obvious new demands. International pilots almost inevitably needed a common language to communicate with airport control systems around the world, unless they visited a single language area alone. English, in the postwar context, obviously fit the bill. Advancing technologies, like computers, predictably required new words, and while these could be translated – the French, fiercely, often tried to substitute for English in the information technology field – it was hard to resist the commonalities English provided. A key motive to learn English centered on the fact that, in many language areas, only English-language computer texts were available. The increasing globalization of science, with researchers exchanging across borders, and the growing reliance on international conferences to exchange knowledge, again promoted a single common tongue, and by the early 21st century 66 percent of all scientists in the world spoke English. While some of the new global organizations, like the United Nations, accepted several official languages, it was increasingly tempting – in places like the World Bank,

176  Contemporary Globalization with employees from all regions but a Washington base – to use English as common denominator. Even linguistically divided India, or later the European Union, found this to be the case. By 2008, 80 percent of the electronically stored information in the world was in English – another huge inducement. As athletics went increasingly global, here too English could be vital: a professional tennis player with any aspirations learned to communicate in the language along with developing a net game. Both pressures and opportunities to learn English mounted steadily. New capacities, like global news services broadcasting in the language, increased exposure to English but also the expectation that certain types of people would be familiar if not fluent. In the process also, English tag lines became fashionable features in commercial advertising, making goods seem more desirable and cosmopolitan. The expansion of travel and tourism pressed many cities, in places like South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, or China, to offer street signs and transportation directions in English as well as Korean, Arabic, or Chinese. Even universities got into the game: many institutions found that they had to develop courses in English if they hoped to attract significant numbers of foreign students. Universities that sought to improve their global reputation pressed faculty to publish in the leading international journals – and these in turn were almost always in English. Required courses in English became increasingly common in secondary schools, generally now in preference to any other foreign language – in contrast to a more traditional menu of options. Special English-language institutes, offering short courses, proliferated. “Learn English in just 10 weeks!” More and more universities in places like the Netherlands, Russia, or China offered regular programs in English to help their students link to the wider world and to attract international students for whom the language was the only common currency. By the early 21st century, with at least 100 million Chinese children studying English (more than the total population of the United Kingdom), the number of English users from other native languages vastly surpassed the number for whom English was native tongue. Demand for Britons, or Australians, or Americans to teach abroad frequently surpassed the available supply. One estimate suggested that by 2015 over half of the world’s people would have some grasp of English. As a 12-year-old self-taught student of English in China noted, “If you can’t speak English, you’re deaf and dumb.” A Briton teaching a variety of international students, including a South Korean manager and a nurse from rural Japan, asks, “Do you want a lot of homework or a little?” And the unequivocal answer: “A lot.” At a Japanese car plant in the Czech Republic, English was the only available working language for the multinational managerial team. Countries where English has long been common, like India, prospered through this facility, piling up outsourced jobs that required telephone services in English to the United States or Britain. Newer entrants, like Burundi, long accustomed to using French to supplement the native languages, now officially switched to

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  177 English. The story was universal: English was becoming a vital entry to globalization, and its spread facilitated the process in turn. Of course, there were drawbacks, including worries about traditional cultural integrity and resentments over the prime position of a single language. A number of localized languages died out entirely, or were severely threatened. Native English speakers became increasingly lazy about learning other tongues, which might hinder more sophisticated globalization in the long run. People who learned English as a second language might become more reluctant to learn a third: why bother, when “everyone” speaks English. China, as its global role increased, had some hopes of encouraging wider international use of Mandarin. Overall, however, the English-language momentum was unchecked. New technologies; new and deliberate international institutions; global reorientation of many national policies; and finally, shifts in language facility combined to create an unprecedentedly powerful global framework. A host of other developments followed, some of which – like the rise of multinational corporations – provided additional spurs for change. The Ambivalent Role of the Cold War The variety of factors promoting new levels of globalization after 1945 were both complicated and promoted by the Cold War, which warrants comment before turning to the various manifestations of globalization’s most recent phase. As noted, communist nations did not initially participate in the new international economic agreements. They were heavily involved in the United Nations, but even here they held back from approving the new human rights declarations, finding them too individualistic; abstention was the most common response. For many decades, globalization was deeply affected by the military and political rivalries of the two Cold War sides, though a host of nations tried to avoid commitment to either rival. The United States developed a complex network of alliances, particularly in Europe and Southeast Asia, while the Soviets had a tight bloc of countries in Eastern Europe and links as well to communist China after 1949, and later to Cuba. Yet the Cold War reflected and encouraged certain forms of globalization as well. Both sides sought to contribute to economic development in places like Africa; Egypt, for example, received support at various points, including a massive Soviet loan plus technical expertise to build a new dam on the Nile river. The two sides also competed globally for cultural attention. The Soviet Union provided direct support to communist parties in many regions, but even beyond this each side sought to use what was called “soft power” to showcase its cultural and political achievements. The United States, for example, sent jazz musicians to a host of countries, promoting a degree of musical globalization in the process. Educational exchange was a crucial competitive focus as well. The United States and its Western allies encouraged students from many non-aligned countries

178  Contemporary Globalization to study at their universities, with opportunities to specialize in engineering or agriculture degrees a prime attraction. The Soviet Union was active as well, however, within but also well beyond the communist bloc of nations. From the 1960s to 1990, over 50,000 Africans attended university in the Soviet Union, and thousands more did the same in other East European countries; some were converted to communism, and many more remained grateful for their experience and eager to avoid exclusive commitment to Western leadership in the global cultural arena. The later stages of the Cold War also saw important new international agreements, seeking to limit weapons levels and restrict the number of countries that had nuclear arms – though a few nations refused to sign on to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968ff). Global arms control had been pioneered with 1920s arrangements on the size of navies and the use of poison gas, but this new pattern was more extensive, involving more regions. Among other things, above-ground nuclear tests were banned outright. In addition to formal agreements, increased cultural contacts, for example between Russian and American scientists, also served to reduce tensions during the 1970s and 1980s. The apparent end of the Cold War, during the late 1980s, unquestionably facilitated further globalization in many ways, including the more active involvement of Russia and Eastern Europe in a fuller range of global activities and organizations such as the World Trade group. But the Cold War had contributed to globalization in some respects as well. Facets of Globalization: Trade and Inequalities Both before and after the Cold War, global trade massively increased, as always providing a measurement of one of the most basic aspects of globalization at any historical point. Between 1913 and 2020, the volume of global exports rose by 4000 percent. The surge particularly accelerated during the half-century after the 1950s, once postwar economic recovery was largely complete. With unprecedented transportation facilities and numerous international organizations and agreements encouraging relatively free trade, opportunities increased as never before, though of course there were significant national differences and also year-toyear oscillations depending on economic conditions. A number of nations depended hugely on exports. Established manufacturing countries like Britain, with exports accounting for 18 percent of the overall national economy, and Germany, at 25 percent, provided obvious examples. Newer-comers periodically enjoyed huge surges. Japan’s exports grew 21 percent per year in the 1970s. Early in the 21st century, between 2002 and 2007, China expanded its exports by 400 percent. Key raw materials producers obviously depended massively on global trade, like the mineral- and diamond-producing regions of Africa. Chile’s rise as an economic power depended heavily on commercial agricultural exports of fruits and vegetables to North America and East Asia. The importance of

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  179 global trade showed in certain product lines. The vast majority of the commercial airliners used around the world emanated from two companies by the early 21st century, Boeing in the United States and Airbus in Europe. Only a small amount of Russian production provided any significant alternative to the two global giants. The importance of energy exports grew steadily, fueling manufacturing in places like China and Japan. Huge supertankers ferried oil from the Middle East, Russia, and the United States, plus a few other centers like Nigeria and Venezuela. New international pipelines carried both oil and gas. Coal exports, from nations like Australia, the United States, and China remained significant as well. Elements of this trade had begun in the later 19th century – Japan’s early industrialization had depended in part on energy imports – but the scale now expanded massively. New trade levels and export dependence revolutionized certain aspects of daily life. In wealthy countries, foods from around the world were regularly available, making unfamiliar products like New Zealand kiwis regular entrants to the more upscale fruit plates in the United States, Europe, and East Asia. Along with the growing popularity of foreign restaurants in big cities almost everywhere, the opportunities for common eating experiences grew as never before, significantly modifying national food traditions at least in some countries. Rising international trade meant, most obviously, growing dependence on the world economy for large numbers of regions, industries, and workers. Even in a huge economy like the United States, up to 20 percent of the manufacturing labor force in states like Illinois depended directly on exports for their jobs. Rising trade meant, also, new opportunities for consumers, at least in the middle and upper classes, to obtain a broader range of goods and sometimes cheaper or better-made items than were available through purely domestic auspices. The global economy, even as it aggressively expanded, also brought further signs of regional economic inequalities and sometimes heightened inequalities within individual countries, as between rural and urban areas in places like India. These problems were not basically new: they had surfaced in earlier stages of trans-regional interactions. Some of the same areas were involved, in the deepest poverty or the greatest affluence, as those that had been defined as early as the 16th century – though there was some shuffling of the cast of characters. By the later 20th century, many experts pointed to the enduring problems of the “Global South,” where commodity exports based on low-wage labor predominated, in some cases not balanced by any significant growth of a local industrial sector. Several factors pushed certain regions – many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and portions of Latin America, southeast Asia, and even the Middle East – into growing poverty, and they did not all stem, directly at least, from globalization. Rapid population increase was a problem in specific areas, diverting resources from economic growth. At least as important, however, was the fact that the prices for many raw materials and foods (other than oil) dropped massively (by over 50 percent

180  Contemporary Globalization from 1980 to the early 1990s), as production capacity outstripped demand – an old problem in specific areas now made worse by more intense globalization. International indebtedness trapped some regional economies also, causing financial crises that pulled regions down in the global framework. The International Monetary Fund was frequently criticized for harsh policies toward indebted nations, forcing burdensome repayments. Technological change was another contributor as it often advantaged existing industrial leaders, like Japan and the United States, giving them greater profit margins even in sales to the poorest countries. Economic gaps were not just matters of statistics. They counted in human lives. People in some of the poorest regions faced massive unemployment levels – of 30 to 50 percent, particularly in categories like younger workers. In a few cases, like parts of Africa in the past few decades, actual rates of child mortality, improving slowly before, began to reverse direction, in part because of growing poverty. By the early 21st century, however, at least before the economic crisis of 2008–9 and then the Covid pandemic, most assessments of regional inequalities became markedly more optimistic, mainly because huge countries like China and India began to participate more effectively in world trade and saw average incomes begin to ratchet up, with a substantial middle class emerging and the numbers of the very poor dropping, often quite rapidly. By the early 21st century, several parts of Africa, such as Uganda and Kenya, began to display rapid economic growth rates – up to 8 percent per year – as manufacturing expanded along with opportunities for raw materials exports to rising countries like China. But this must not mask the fact that certain regions continued to suffer. China’s emergence as a global production giant, for example, added new competition to manufacturing sectors in Southeast Asia and Africa, providing an additional source of inequality along with the activities of the fully industrialized nations. Overall, by the early 21st century, 20 percent of the world’s population, living in the richest regions, controlled 86 percent of overall global product; the lowest 20 percent had access to but 1 percent. The division was stark and at the extremes still growing, even though overall regional inequality was declining. The global economic picture was also affected by increased efforts at economic aid, both to relieve poverty and to promote economic development. The new international agencies deployed some investment funds, while U.N. subsidiaries like the Food and Agriculture Organization sought to combat hunger. A host of private charities contributed, as did national and regional governments, both before and after the Cold War competition. By the 21st century, China became a major investor abroad through its Road and Belt initiative, providing loans and grants in various parts of Asia and Africa particularly toward the development of infrastructure. These many efforts, including the Chinese, were not always effective; they sometimes came with strings attached; but they could alleviate distress and promote solid economic growth.

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  181 Globalization was also heavily involved in the so-called Green Revolution that gained ground internationally from the 1970s onward, featuring the development of better seeds and agricultural practices that would expand food production. The “revolution” had its origins in contacts between the United States and Mexico in the 1930s, funded in part by the American Rockefeller Foundation but involving scientists from both countries. Their findings and joint expertise were then exported to places like India. The Green Revolution had its drawbacks: it favored commercial farmers over traditional peasants, often worsening their situation. But it did improve food security and reduce famine in a number of crucial regions. Overall, contemporary globalization produced some clear economic conundrums. Regional disparities increased at first – from the mid-20th century – but then receded, in some cases quite dramatically. Economic globalization by the 1990s seemed to provide new opportunities, not just new exploitation, at least for many key regions. Global poverty rates declined rapidly from the 1990s onward: by 2018, more than a hundred people were rising above extreme poverty levels every second. Which pattern – overall improvement versus persistent inequality – represents globalization’s durable face? Complicating the problem was another poverty dilemma: as regional differentiations eased (without yet disappearing), inequities within societies increased – and this was true for places otherwise as different as the United States, India, and China. The rural poor – groups with little or no education – seemed unable to take advantage of globalization and in many cases suffered from new levels of global competition. Overall, it was estimated that the income gap between the world’s poorest 10 percent, and the richest 10 percent, moved from 1:7 to 1:9 between the 1990s and 2020, and it continued to widen. Finally, of course, there were the recurrent economic crises themselves. Some economic nosedives did not fully spread to global levels. A sharp recession in the later 1990s thus affected parts of East and Southeast Asia primarily. But major downturns clearly operated at the global level. A financial crisis in the United States, in 2008, brought banks down in many other countries because investments were global in scope. Reduction of American demand inevitably cut production rates in other countries because so much depended on the huge and voracious American consumer markets. As credit dried up worldwide, and unemployment rose in many regions (with the accompanying departure of many immigrant workers back to often impoverished homelands), the fact of global interdependence, but also its obvious vulnerabilities, was starkly clear. Even in China, growth rates, though still substantial, began to slow by 2015, and this in turn affected raw materials sales from countries like Brazil. While the early 21st-century crisis was not as severe as that of the 1930s, in part because of protective global mechanisms, it was even more widespread geographically and its global manifestations accelerated far more rapidly than had been true before – another sign of change, if a gloomy one.

182  Contemporary Globalization Migration, Travel, and Global Communities New travel facilities and new problems both helped prompt new surges of immigration, mainly from the 1960s onward. The big story was the movement of workers from impoverished parts of the world to centers of industry and urban growth. The United States received a rising tide of migrants from many parts of Latin America and Asia. Europe newly became a global immigrant destination, with huge numbers of Muslim workers from North Africa, the Middle East, and Pakistan, and additional people from Africa and the Caribbean. Even Japan, more resistant to immigrants, saw numbers grow from Southeast Asia. Indian, Palestinian, and Filipino workers poured into the construction projects of the United Arab Emirates, creating a population that was over 80 percent expatriate (non-citizen). Countries like Algeria (with workers particularly to France) and the Philippines (with unusual numbers of women working as waitresses, child care givers, and nurses literally all over the industrial world) provided especially large numbers of migrants and depended heavily on their remissions back home, but the phenomenon was widespread. Long-distance movement, bringing people from dramatically different cultures into contact with each other and with the new host country, had never been greater, though the basic phenomenon was not novel. Advanced industrial regions with low birth rates often needed new workers, and clearly there were many people eager, or forced, to oblige. The system was often exploitative. Some countries expelled workers as soon as they lost a job, adding displacement to economic shock. Western Europeans called many of the immigrants “guest workers,” but they were not always cordial hosts. Many workers in the Emirates had 24 hours to leave the country if their employment ended. Many women were seized as sex slaves, lured abroad with the promise of a service job, which turned out to be mere prostitution. The global sex trade reached massive proportions by the 1990s. Overall, a 2005 report suggested that 600,000–800,000 people were being “trafficked” each year – that is, enticed to other countries where they would be virtually enslaved, often for sexual purposes. The steady growth of illegal immigration, pushed by poverty, political crises, and climate change, left many workers vulnerable to demands from employers and roughing by police. Periodic violence against immigrants from such different backgrounds added to pressures, with occasional riots both against the immigrant tide and by displaced immigrants themselves. Again, many of these features were not brand new, but the scale was unprecedented. Immigrants also had new opportunities to travel periodically from new home to old. One benefit the Emirates offered to international construction workers was an annual trip home. Hispanics in the United States often went back and forth to their families of origin. Affluent immigrants, for example professionals from India, used the airlines to the same purpose. The result allowed new combinations of cultures, as old ways – like arranged marriages, for many Asian

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  183 Indians – could be periodically recalled. One prominent Saudi diplomat, comfortable in his own country but also enjoying a mountain home in Colorado, referred to himself as “bicultural” – adaptive to both his main settings, despite their great differences. Returning immigrants, even on visits, could also bring new ideas and disruptions among friends and relatives who had not moved – another source of global change. International travel now included tremendous waves of global tourism, often seeking the distant and (on paper at least) the exotic – and the sun. Here, thanks to ready travel and a new zeal for vacation pleasure, the dimensions of change were substantial – though the results (on tourists and those who served them) were not always easy to determine. Numbers were staggering: by 1990, millions of people were annually arriving someplace outside their home country as tourists; yet by 2004 the figure had already increased by 78 percent. Southern Europe was the largest single destination, but many regions participated and growth was actually strongest in parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, with good winter climates and the ability to attract visitors from Europe, East Asia, and Australia; the Caribbean also enjoyed a huge boom. Japanese tourists headed in many directions, including Hawaii, and by 2010 Chinese tourists were joining the parade. Russian tourism increased after the end of the Cold War, with favorite destinations including Turkey and Cyprus. The fall of communism led to some interesting new destinations for other tourists, like central Asia. In some cases, regions suffering from global competition in manufacturing sought to use climate and beaches, and cheap local labor, to create a tourist industry to compensate. Reliance on international tourism became a significant factor in the world economy. Global tourism came in various packages, with the extent of the global a bit of a variable. In 1950, a Belgian entrepreneur founded Club Méditerranée, or Club Med, initially to cater to single tourists interested in an experience abroad, later expanding to families. While the initial targets, in Spain and elsewhere around the Mediterranean, were not distant from Europe, in 1955 the company began to branch out with a center in Tahiti. Soon, Clubs were scattered in Thailand, the Caribbean, Florida, Turkey, and elsewhere – wherever there was sun (or for skiers, snow) to be found. The Club offered various activities and considerable assurance that basic (Western) amenities would be available. In dining, particularly, local cuisine was introduced only once a week – otherwise, standard European fare was offered. Except as service workers, locals were largely kept out as well. Visitors could arrange bus tours to see the sights, but they were carefully shielded from real local involvement. Resort hotels, springing up in Malaysia or Cancun, operated on the same principle: one might be abroad, but it should not be very different from home. Indeed, international tourists were grouped into several categories. The largest by far, sometimes called package tourists, did not expect to endure much that departed from what they were used to. This included people who flocked

184  Contemporary Globalization to charter boats that only occasionally disembarked passengers on local soil, usually to shop and then get back on the boat. As one tourist to a Spanish island put it, it seemed as though she was still in Germany because there were so many co-nationals around: “The nightlife is just like being in a Spanish theme bar back home.” A smaller number of tourists, however, really wanted to get off the beaten track and experience local culture and deliberately escape the familiar. Often, a new destination – like central Asia recently, or parts of Indonesia – first attracted the explorer-type tourists, and only later drew in the big, amenity-filled hotels. How much of the experience, not to mention the motivation, was really global for the bulk of the new tourists was open to question. Impact on the new tourist centers was also complex. There were obvious clashes of culture. German and other European tourists from the 1960s onward often expected to be able to enjoy topless bathing – locals were truly shocked but often acquiesced because of the lure of profits, and then found that their own young people began to relax their dress styles as well. Young men sometimes misinterpreted tourist costumes as an invitation to hit on female travelers – with varied reactions in response. On the other hand, some local tourist workers put in their long days and then went home with no particular cultural impact to report – it was just a job. Some of the most interesting consequences of tourism involved adaptations of local cultural products designed to combine traces of traditional styles with the features tourists associated with that particular site. Tahitians, for example, were expected to be sensual, and customary dances might be modified to live up to the expected image. Maasai warriors, on display for tourists in Kenya, were expected to wear certain kinds of costumes – not what they currently wore, and not always really traditional – and to look fierce (while dancing before visitors as the latter sipped Western cocktails). In one Maasai performance, unusually adapted, dancers included evocations of the Lion King movie, including the phrase Hakuna Matata, and adding some Jamaican dances as well, just to broaden the appeal. Globalization, here, added up to significant distortion of local cultural standards, whether for better or for worse. The process might make preservation of actual traditions increasingly difficult. Tourism, but even more migration and professional travel, contributed to the formation of certain kinds of potential global communities, defined by common bonds (including globalized cultural productions) across national and cultural lines. A case in point, though only for a minority of those involved, highlights the growing interest in study abroad from the 1950s onward. Study abroad programs blossomed in the postwar decades. The number of Americans studying internationally, at least for brief stints, quadrupled between 1990 and 2007. Worldwide, by 2003, 1.5 million students were involved in programs outside their home country. Graduate students from Asia and Africa headed to training opportunities in science, technology, and management in industrial centers. Undergraduates sought broader cultural experience. China, India, Korea, and Japan began sending large numbers of undergraduates abroad, either for full degree

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  185 programs or for a semester experience. Many Western universities as a result boasted 10–15 percent of their student bodies from other nations. Study abroad programs did not automatically, of course, create lasting effects: many students stuck with colleagues from their own country, even if they also developed some new cross-cultural skills. But some students began to form friendships and professional ties, and sometimes romantic relationships, that would serve them lifelong, modifying and in some cases replacing the links to home country. Given travel, communication, and study opportunities, it was not surprising that a number of transnational communities began to form, with members sharing an identity that might supersede their regional roots. Many scientists, for example, traveled almost interchangeably from one lab to another, regardless of nation, usually with English as the communication medium; global ties would be further renewed at frequent international conferences and through use of the Internet or virtual meetings through Zoom (launched in 2013). In certain sports, like tennis, touring athletes had the same experience, at least during their playing days. The same sense of borderless community might develop among some of the crucial new organizations that sprang up from globalization, notably the multinational corporations and the international NGOs. These groups, too, could form close ties among people from various national origins – professional links and social interactions as well. The possibility existed that new kinds of loyalties and identities, around professions or human rights or environmental commitments or simple profit-seeking, could begin to replace regional and national markers – not yet for a majority of people but for a growing cosmopolitan minority. As always, however, some caveats apply. Many people could not or did not wish to travel – less than a quarter of all Americans, for example, even had passports. National loyalties still burned bright for many people. A military confrontation between Britain and Argentina in the 1980s over a south Atlantic island controlled by the former brought out surprisingly fierce passions in two seemingly sophisticated countries. Another continuity from the past that not only persisted but increased in complexity involved passport and visa regulations. The Cold War prompted many countries to increase requirements for the permissions needed to cross borders. Growing terrorism early in the 21st century had the same effect in many places. Passports were supplemented by fingerprinting and eye scans, and many travelers who fit certain stereotypes were pulled aside for further interrogation. The process could be unpleasant and even insulting, and some people stopped traveling to certain destinations in consequence. The global community had a number of dead ends. An Organizational Revolution? Multinationals and INGOs Debate over how new contemporary globalization is can focus in part on a more precise issue: how revolutionary were the multinational corporations? In the eyes of the new global historians, multinational corporations operate in

186  Contemporary Globalization distinctive ways and wield unprecedented power not just in the world economy, but in matters of the environment and in labor conditions and gender roles. But companies with international activities and great trans-regional impacts are not new, and questions can focus on how much – despite the novel term – has really changed. Efforts at definition abound. Multinational corporations operate in many areas of the world simultaneously, with assets widely distributed as well. They can amass huge budgets, though scales vary. Their most characteristic feature is the installation of production processes in various regions, often with different specializations depending on the area. In the late 19th century, an international company might mine raw materials in one place, produce in another; or it might have factories in several places making whole products. The contemporary multinational, however, may make one set of components for a product in Indonesia (either directly or through a subcontractor), another set in Turkey, a third set in Kentucky, for assembly in Mexico. This new degree of specialization and international coordination allows the company to seek lowest labor costs, cheapest raw materials, most lenient environmental regulation, all the while taking full advantage of the new facilities in global transportation and communication for sales distribution and management coordination. The same specialization allows many companies to shift locations fairly readily if costs begin to mount in one setting – and no government is powerful enough to stop them. All of this means, in turn, that the multinational corporation can have devastating regional impacts, in contrast to earlier trading companies that could certainly affect and exploit regions but were also more closely tied to particular localities. Whether the multinational is a new animal or a somewhat redefined version of older international ventures is open to question. What cannot be disputed is the rapid increase in the number of global businesses: in 1914, there were roughly 3,000 real international companies; the number had doubled by 1970; but by 1988, the number was 18,500, and by 2000, it had soared to 63,000. Multinationals were of course largely based in the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea, but entrants began to emerge also from China and a few other high-growth economies. The companies wielded huge power. Their directors were themselves a multinational group, but joined by great wealth and similar, cosmopolitan life styles, punctuated of course by frequent travel. The organizations frequently affected basic policies, even in large nations – opposing labor reforms in China early in the 21st century, for example, that threatened to increase costs (often with the implicit threat of pulling out if pressed too far). They not uncommonly ignored environmental rules, using bribes as well as sheer influence to curry favor. At the same time, however, they brought jobs to areas with excess population, and in some cases their managers – often from the home country – were seen as offering better labor treatment than local firms generated. The trans-regional impact record was mixed.

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  187 Joining the multinationals, less powerful but sometimes providing a degree of counterbalance, were the International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs), which were in some ways more genuinely novel than the business ventures, though with links to prototypes of the later 19th century. INGOs varied greatly, but they all had some degree of international participation, on governing boards and among financial contributors, and they aimed at correcting problems in various parts of the world. Often, they also appealed to “world opinion,” by the 1990s using the Internet to call for massive email-­ writing campaigns to correct various kinds of injustice. Usually, they linked to local NGOs that helped provide information about problems and might help monitor responses. While mostly based in the West, they won attention from people in various places; and some other countries, like Japan, headquartered significant INGOs as well. The numbers and range of activity of the INGOs grew steadily, although probably not as rapidly as the multinationals did. Perhaps as many as 200 existed in 1900, up to 2,000 in 1960, and nearly 4,000 in 1980, with rapid further growth since that time. Many multinationals were directly linked to other global organizations: some consulted with the United Nations or the International Criminal Court, and many others were inspired by United Nations declarations of human rights. While it had roots deep in earlier global history – including the humanitarian concerns of Quakerism and the passionate efforts against slavery – Amnesty International demonstrated many of the qualities of the contemporary INGO, and it served as prototype for a host of other groups. Formed in 1961, with a London base, Amnesty initially sought to attack the political persecutions that were occurring within the framework of the Cold War. Its founder laid out the charge: Open your newspaper any day of the week, and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or his religion are unacceptable to his government … The newspaper reader feels a sickening sense of impotence. Yet if these feelings of disgust all over the world could be united into common action, something effective could be done. By 1977, when Amnesty won the Nobel Peace Prize, it had identified over 15,000 political prisoners in communist, democratic, and developing nations alike, and had helped galvanize freedom for half of them. It promoted rights for famous detainees like Nelson Mandela in South Africa, for trade union organizers in Central America, for prisoners in Northern Ireland, and for American civil rights workers. By the 1980s, the organization had 700,000 members from 150 countries, and offices in 50 different nations. Outraged public opinion was its stock in trade: Amnesty worked hard to publicize cases of human rights violation, mobilizing massive petitions, urging voters to press their governments, and using maximum publicity to prompt offenders to pull back.

188  Contemporary Globalization Amnesty steadily expanded its definitions of rights and broadened its own agenda. It attacked torture systematically, wherever it seemed to occur. It defended rights for workers. It began to pay growing attention to abuses of women, helping to define rape as a war crime but also moving into the area of domestic violence. And all of this depended on a capacity for reporting in virtually every part of the world, while maintaining standards for decency that were global in scope. Amnesty’s success prompted the formation of other human rights INGOs, like Human Rights Watch (formed in 1978) but also a host of other activist movements, effectively augmenting the range of issues covered by a global spotlight. The mid-1980s saw a burst of local rights groups, for example in Central America, coordinating with the key global organizations. Environmental INGOs began to form in the late 1960s. Friends of the Earth (1969) boasted over 700,000 international members by the 1990s, working actively to combat global warming or the reduction of the ozone layer; the more activist Greenpeace dated from 1971, and by the 1990s it had offices in over 30 countries and claimed over 6 million members worldwide. Like their human rights colleagues, environmentalists sought to establish global standards for policy and behavior, across national lines. Treatment of workers inspired yet another set of INGOs, often linked to labor unions: the Dutch-based Clean Clothes Campaign, for example, set up branches in all major countries to fight against sweatshop conditions by publicizing abuses and signing up millions of signatories on petition campaigns that pressed prominent companies to pledge reforms to address excessively low pay, forced overtime, or lack of safety on the job. Here, INGOs could among other things urge their sympathizers around the world to boycott the products of offenders. Protection of consumer standards prompted another set of INGOs seeking to assure product quality. Originating primarily in the West, global consumer groups frequently embraced tensions between moderate Western activists and leaders in other countries like Malaysia, who targeted Western countries for exploiting non-Western markets with substandard goods. Another facet of the expansion of INGO activity involved more extensive humanitarian efforts across national boundaries. Thus, a group of French physicians founded the organization known in English as Doctors Without Borders in 1971, initially to assist people affected by civil strife in Nigeria. The group expanded steadily, with over 30,000 volunteers by 2015 working in some of the most dangerous parts of the world to provide basic health care. Another international group sought to protect journalists. Despite occasional regional tensions, the INGO movement increasingly sought to provide some global balance against the power of the multinationals. In the 1970s, for example, global campaigns pressed the Nestle Company to stop selling powdered milk in Africa, where its use amid unsanitary conditions frequently caused infants to die. A massive international boycott resulted, termed “the most devastating attack ever mounted on corporate advertising in the Third World” – and ultimately Nestle gave in. By the 1990s, well-publicized

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  189 pressures on companies like Nike produced promises to improve labor conditions in Vietnam and Central America. Links between local and global organizations produced similar corporate commitments to reduce environmental pollution in places like Indonesia. A global effort in the 1980s pressed the McDonalds restaurant chain to stop using non-biodegradable Styrofoam cups and beef imported from the rain forest areas of Brazil: a company spokesperson had to admit, in 1990, that “because of our high visibility, the environment was becoming a monumental problem for us.” Corporate exploitation, both of workers and the environment, continued, of course, and some responses to INGO tactics were either temporary or superficial – including environment-friendly publicity campaigns that had little to do with reality. Still, it was significant that global organizations were proceeding on several different fronts, moving well beyond the familiar emphasis on international trade and production and that the whole process was generating some (partially) self-correcting features. The expansion of global institutions in number and in range of function was clearly a key aspect of globalization more generally, reflecting the new framework in communication (and the use of English as a global language) but also pushing transnational exchange to unprecedented levels. A dramatic shift in scale was unquestionable, and, as the new global historians argued, it was certainly possible to interpret the result – the range of activities that now regularly exceeded the national level – as a revolutionary change in the nature and organization of human activities. Global Politics Regular efforts at coordinating international policies on key issues and establishing functioning international institutions dated back to the later 19th century, but there was no question that, here too, the scope and intensity of activity ratcheted up many notches from the late 1940s onward. As in the late 19th century, political globalization involved both new institutions – including of course the United Nations and its various subgroups – and new pressures on individual nations to live up to various global norms, often framed in terms of the force of world opinion. Policy efforts to encourage freer trade and international financial coordination, part of the framework for the new round of globalization, were direct components of the larger global political process. INGOs played their own role in spurring global attention to key problems, prodding individual governments and rousing larger public opinion to respond to issues across national lines. Examples of global political capacity multiplied. At the same time, the global political arsenal remained limited, and there were many constraining forces: nothing close to a world government emerged, despite hopes in some quarters and fears in others. The political side of globalization was a glass half empty – compared with the needs generated by the welter of world problems – or half full – compared with responses just a half-century before.

190  Contemporary Globalization International conferences abounded on virtually every imaginable issue of global policy, some sponsored by the United Nations, others prompted by groups of individual nations. Trade issues, obviously, were a recurring topic, so were labor conditions. Spurred by the United Nations, an international convention was forged on various rights for children, including a prohibition on treating children who committed crimes as adults or subjecting them to capital punishment; only the United States refused to sign on. Economic development and agriculture, women’s issues, treatment of refugees, and as we will see environmental concerns also focused international attention. The conduct of war remained a key topic: various international meetings sought to define and punish acts of genocide, others dealt with efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, another urged a ban on landmines (another international treaty that was widely approved, though which the United States refused to sign), still others tried to ban the use of child soldiers. Supplementing global politics per se was a steady expansion of global charities beyond the formal foreign aid supplied by governments in most industrial nations (albeit at widely varying levels). Natural disasters like earthquakes or tsunamis called forth massive giving, as well as short-term efforts by many nations to provide emergency assistance. People in the United States alone contributed over a billion dollars for relief in an Indian Ocean tsunami disaster in the early 21st century. The idea of charity for strangers, across borders, operated in many directions. Thus, while attention focused most obviously on disasters in poorer regions, a calamity like the flooding associated with hurricane Katrina in the United States drew voluntary gifts from groups and individuals in many countries, from Europe to Saudi Arabia to Japan. A variety of campaigns, some under official sponsorship of key governments and others from private groups, sought to define a host of global policy standards, expanding what was often referred to as “world opinion.” The 1948 Universal Charter on Human Rights, ultimately signed by most nations, provided real momentum for global standards in this vital area. From the late 1940s onward, the United Nations regularly issued proclamations on the equality of women, and then from 1965 onward began sponsoring recurrent conferences to spread the word. Many local groups formed as a result, and large numbers of governments did, in response, add assurances of equality to their national constitutions. Thus, in 1975, the Organization of African Unity recognized “international standards of general application designed for the protection of rights of women.” African courts in a number of countries began to rule in favor of women’s property rights, highlighting the fact that governments had agreed to international conventions on equality. On another front, in 2006, the United States Supreme Court ruled against capital punishment for children, citing among other things the international standards on this subject. Not infrequently, the idea of global norms significantly affected national policies even on core issues. During the 1950s, wide public concern responded to above-ground nuclear testing and its spread of certain cancer-causing pollutants

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  191 in the atmosphere. Various groups in the West and Japan, in the Middle East (particularly against French testing in the Sahara), among Buddhists and other religious constituencies generated marches, petitions, and letters that finally caused major governments, including the United States, to agree to a test ban treaty. Another broad opinion movement in the 1980s, particularly in Europe and the United States, pressed businesses to withdraw investments from South Africa in protest against the racist policy of apartheid and attendant police repression, and along with intense local agitation finally caused the changes in law that collapsed that system in favor of democracy and legal equality. Never before had this kind of global pressure played such a role in military or internal policy, seeking to define types of health threats or racial inequalities that had simply become unacceptable according to a potent if ill-defined global community. American President Dwight Eisenhower acknowledged the force in 1958, in response to a scientist who urged him to continue nuclear testing: “the new thermonuclear weapons are tremendously powerful; however they are not … as powerful as is world opinion today in obliging the United States to follow certain lines of policy.” The importance of global governance, even if informally organized, showed up interestingly in response to the economic crisis of 2008–9 – in striking contrast to the absence of effective global response to the depression of the 1930s, when narrow national policies predominated, including the heightened tariffs that almost certainly made matters worse. Quickly, late in 2008, a new “group of 20” was convened to include economic powers in Asia and Latin America as well as the more familiar cluster of Western industrial nations plus Japan. While disagreements persisted, literally every major leader recognized that transnational coordination was essential and that the crisis also demonstrated the need for new global rules over the behavior of financial institutions. Globalism was no longer almost entirely Western, and it was seen as the only approach that could possibly master economic problems that were themselves worldwide in scope. But the global political glass was also half empty. Many nations, having signed global conventions, pulled back in fact. Several African courts, for example, began after 2000 to revert to more customary law in arguing that women should not own property, despite formal adherence to equal rights pledges. Some global goals, like the abolition of child soldiers, were simply ignored by rebel groups that had no interest in international standards. Negotiations about the environment often foundered on the unwillingness of the United States to sign major agreements. Japan tried to resist the global efforts to limit the harvest of whales, actually pulling out of an agreement in 2018. Ambitious hopes to get agreement on banning child labor proved overreaching, as a number of south Asian countries, dependent on growing amounts of child labor (against the larger global trends), simply held back. While a global approach to the economic crisis of 2008 largely prevailed, a few countries, like Ecuador, raised tariffs in an attempt to isolate the national economy from the larger crisis.

192  Contemporary Globalization Global intervention in crises proved inconsistent. World opinion and the interests of several key states helped prompt action against civil strife in the former Yugoslavia or East Timor, but it largely held back from anything but ineffective laments in some of the bloody African clashes, like the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s. Media coverage highlighted some tragedies more than others, public opinion proved somewhat fickle, and motivations for action in some places, like Africa, were simply less acute than in other instances. Some observers worried that racist biases helped explain why certain crises were essentially ignored. Despite sincere hopes, no uniform standards emerged for internal politics. From the 1970s onward, liberal democracies did begin to spread widely, encouraged by support from existing democracies and from the relative success of democratic forms in the West, Japan, and India. Democracy gained fairly uniformly in Latin America, in places like the Philippines and Indonesia, and in a large minority of the states of Africa, as well as most Eastern European countries after the fall of communism. But much of the Middle East held back, aside perhaps from minor concessions such as elected local councils; China put down a major democratic movement in 1989; Russia’s commitment to democracy seemed to falter increasingly after 2000. It was not clear that agreement on basic political principles was going to be part of the global future. Human rights formed a vital conflict zone. On the one hand, statements of global rights proliferated, from the 1948 Universal Charter onward. Women were routinely included in human rights lists, both in general and in specific conventions designed to resolve problems such as child marriage. A striking U.N. Security Council ruling in 2023, unanimously condemning the effort to exclude women from U.N. agencies in Afghanistan, confirmed widespread global agreement: Muslim-majority, democratic, and authoritarian governments all joined in this effort to protect some basic opportunities for women, Children’s rights themselves received new attention, including the 1989 Charter. But pressure to maintain rights encountered a variety of obstacles. Many though not all Middle Eastern countries held back a bit on equal rights for women. In the 1990s, China and Singapore sought to galvanize an interest in issuing regional, rather than global, human rights definitions. They argued that existing human rights statements, even when approved by the United Nations, were largely Western in orientation, and gave too much priority to individual rights against the state, not enough attention to the rights of community. For many countries, human rights pressures seemed to be a form of neocolonialism rather than a valid expression of global standards. It was unquestionably true that, after the end of their imperial holdings, many Western nations and organizations delighted in calling attention to the human rights failings of governments in Africa, Latin America, and Asia – including new giants like China, causing deep resentments in return. Finally, other trends raised complications for political globalization. The formation of the European Union, designed to overcome the limits of national divisions and to make Europe more effective economically in the larger world, was

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  193 a crucial innovation of the post-World War II decades. The move was not antiglobal. But a focus on building greater European unity and identity could in fact distract from full support for larger global institutions. Europeans sometimes worked more on creation of their own identity than on global standards. An interesting regional group of Southeast Asian nations had similarly ambivalent goals, on the one hand seeking to promote some international standards, on the other hand resisting external pressures. Overall, it was clear that political globalization, while measurably moving forward, was not in the main keeping pace with some of the other facets of globalization. The capacities of the multinationals or the surge of global environmental change outstripped institutions designed to oversee at a global level. It was clear as well that some essentially political claims from the most enthusiastic proponents of globalization were, at the least, premature. Thus, one series of arguments, surging as the Cold War ended by 1991, held that since democracy was becoming a universal political form and since democracies did not go to war with each other, war would become a thing of the past. A variant involved claiming that all societies were becoming consumer focused, which would also inhibit war since conflict damaged living standards. There was, simply, no sign as yet that these sweeping consequences, however desirable, could be seen as part of the real globalization agenda. It was not even possible to predict that democracy itself would become a standard global political form. Global Health Developments on the global health front were in some ways unexpected. The rapid increase in the pace of trans-regional contacts should, by traditional standards, have led to a corresponding surge in the spread of epidemic disease. But while there were some signs of this, new methods of control, expanding from the international public health efforts of the later 19th century, actually constituted a greater change. What had been tentative, disputatious conferences turned into systematic global-organizational efforts. The SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic of 2002–3 was a particularly interesting case in point. The outbreak, which would ultimately kill 774 people, began in China, whose government initially sought to conceal the problem lest it disrupt international contacts of other sorts and embarrass the regime. A Canadian electronic health warning system, operating under the auspices of the World Health Organization, picked up news of the problem in November, and this began to galvanize further international response. The disease did spread rapidly, which is what one would expect with globalization: transmissions that in the 14th century took years, or in the 16th century months, now operated within a matter of days. SARS quickly hit a total of 37 countries, mainly in Asia but also including Canada. Under guidance from the World Health Organization, affected countries began to organize quarantines

194  Contemporary Globalization of afflicted areas – WHO at one point advised against any non-essential travel to Toronto – and also screened airline passengers for signs of disease. Governments in Singapore, Canada, and (under new policy) China actively enforced coordinated measures of protection. By summer 2003, the disease had been contained, with surprisingly little overall damage. The SARS episode testifies, thus, both to the vulnerability to disease transmission that is part of contemporary globalization and to unprecedentedly effective, though not flawless, global response. Another new global disease scare erupted in 2009 with an outbreak of a new kind of swine flu in Mexico that quickly spread to several other countries. World agencies mobilized quickly to monitor air travel and to help fund Mexican medical intervention. A more widespread contemporary global disease, AIDS, had a less happy history. First developing in Africa, AIDS spread fairly rapidly to the Caribbean and elsewhere, transmitted above all by sexual contacts. Some incidence would develop in almost every part of the world, and in the 1980s it was feared that a global health catastrophe might result. Global efforts developed to conduct research on possible therapies and to persuade governments and individuals to take measures that might limit the disease’s spread. Considerable foreign aid and private philanthropy aimed at those African states, mainly in the east and south, where the disease remained particularly acute. Expensive treatments available in the wealthier nations did limit the disease. Government response varied in the world as a whole, causing variations as well in the incidence and prospects for the disease. Overall, the problem was partially contained but not resolved by the early 21st century, and only after over 40 million people had died worldwide. A major outbreak of Ebola in several West African countries in 2014 generated another occasion in which global health responses were tested. The disease was particularly hard to treat in very poor countries amid peoples who were often quite suspicious of medical intervention. International response to the crisis included quarantines or health checks for travelers from the affected regions. Several countries admitted some victims for treatment in their advanced medical centers – though particularly Western aid workers. Response on the spot was slower, in part because of the lack of local infrastructure but in part also because funding for the World Health Organization had been cut. Nevertheless, international assistance, including groups dispatched by the United States, did gradually bolster local efforts and this particular epidemic was largely ended by 2015. Finally, globalization was directly responsible for a different kind of health issue, one that proved both novel and difficult to treat. Improved living standards, and increasing knowledge of the food patterns of the more affluent societies, encouraged growing numbers of people to change their diets, eating more fast foods but particularly consuming more meat – with beef particularly valued. The result had environmental impact, as forests were cleared for cattle that in turn heightened global levels of methane gas. And it certainly had human impact. For diet change coincided, particularly in the cities, with decreasing physical

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  195 activity at work and – with television and computer games – often in play. The result was, literally, a globalization of rising obesity. Worldwide, obesity rates doubled between 1980 and around 2014; with 13 percent of the world’s population classified as obese, a full 1.9 billion were rated overweight, at the latter point: for the first time in history, more people were dying of diseases associated with overeating then from malnutrition. While obesity levels remained highest in the most affluent countries, the rate of change was actually greatest in many moderate or low-income regions. Particular concern focused on the increases in childhood obesity, again as a global issue though with primary application to urban populations. The World Health Organization and other agencies were quick to identify this new global health challenge, but responses to date have had limited impact. Overall, globalization proved compatible with rapidly decreasing global mortality rates, particularly among children, though local public health efforts and growing industrial prosperity played a greater role than global organizations and standards. Still, along with the drop in extreme poverty and despite the increased potential for contagion, health conditions constituted a global positive category overall. At the same time, globalization unquestionably generated some new challenges for disease control, particularly through the heightened speed of transmission. This was an old category for globalization, with some complicated new features. Cultural Globalization The intensity and range of global contacts inevitably spilled over into values and beliefs, modifying without erasing local cultures for many people. Cultural globalization, not brand new, took on new dimensions, and of course created new resistances in turn. Many people – particularly young people – found a real need to feel connected to a larger cultural world. The young man in a McDonald’s restaurant in Shanghai, who noted that he came there not because he liked the food, which was to his mind worse than Chinese food, but because it linked him to global tastes and to youth in other countries, expressed precisely that new kind of thinking. Global cultural currents flowed heavily, but not exclusively, from the United States and to a lesser extent Western Europe. It is vital, however, not to overdo: Japan was also a key center for entertainments such as computer gaming, as cultural exports became a major economic sector, and China, Brazil, India, and many other countries contributed actively as well. Korean entertainers and styles also began to win global audiences. Argentine jazz musicians began to move back and forth from the United States. Mexican cultural influence flourished in Nairobi, Kenya, affecting restaurant fare and popular music. Global culture moved, in other words, in several directions, including to as well as from the United States and Western Europe, picking up new styles but contributing to

196  Contemporary Globalization changes in turn. Americans adopted music crazes from Europe, passionate toy and game fads from Japan, medical practices from China, and movie styles from India – the list was long. Different kinds of people were variously exposed. Some regions were more receptive to global culture than others. Wealth was a factor – global cultural products cost money – but so was prior cultural conditioning. Rural areas had far less access to global culture than urban centers did; even in 2009, only about a third of the world’s population had any contact with the Internet, to take one striking example of cultural constraints, though access to television and radio were more widespread. Global culture had many shapes. Relatively few efforts tried to bridge among the major religions on anything like a worldwide basis. The Roman Catholic papacy did reach out for discussions occasionally with other Christian groups, but also with Jewish, Islamic, and Buddhist leaders, but it periodically antagonized some of these faiths as well. A few other agencies sponsored wide-ranging interfaith dialogues. But other than continued missionary activity by individual religions (with Protestant evangelicals particularly active in Africa and Latin America), there was no real move toward a more global religion. Religious and related political influences from South and Southeast Asia did however gain greater global impact, though without massive formal conversions. Western interest in practices like meditation and yoga spread widely from the 1960s onward, popularized by visits from media stars to shrines in India or elsewhere. From the Indian nationalist tactics developed by Mahatma Gandhi (itself influenced somewhat by Christianity as well as Hinduism), principles of non-violence also spread to other regions, deeply affecting leaders like Martin Luther King, in the United States, or Nelson Mandela in South Africa. More widely, something like global science and medicine gained ground steadily. Scientists from many nations collaborated in major laboratories, even when sponsored by a single national agency. Researchers in Singapore established such a powerful center for research on liver diseases that virtually every regional effort tried to link in; the same applied to Dutch research on breast cancer. For the wealthy, a new category of medical tourism emerged, where some seriously ill people traveled to places like India or Mexico where they could find outstanding modern medical care at relatively lost costs. On a more popular level, access to standard medical treatments and hospitals became increasingly common, at least in urban areas, so the question: what do you do if you fall seriously ill?, increasingly had a global answer. Of course, there were compromises: many people in Taiwan combined traditional rituals with recourse to modern medicine. But the modern medical component was quite real nevertheless. Equally important, exchanges moved in other directions as well. The rise of global roles for China included growing popular interest in Chinese medical approaches including acupuncture, with centers widely available in many countries outside East Asia. Acupuncture began to spread in the United States in the

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  197 1980s; by the early 21st century almost 9 million Americans had received treatment, a major example of mutual flow in science broadly construed. The most obvious emphasis for global culture, however, rested on increasingly widespread and pervasive consumer interests. The spread of movies and television shows created international audiences for common fare; the same applied to the growing popular passion for certain sports, now including basketball and (in the more northern regions) hockey along with earlier staples which themselves became more widely known. Established global venues, like World Cup soccer or the Olympic games, drew steadily more interest from virtually all the world’s regions. The 2022 World Cup final drew 2.2 billion viewers worldwide. For the Olympics, the creation of the Paralympics, in 1960, was another interesting global addition: with 26 nations initially participating, the number increased steadily to 163 by 2020. The surge of basketball was extraordinary: essentially a United States specialty in 1945, by 2015 serious basketball competition as well as professional leagues (spiced with selected US players) operated in Europe including eastern Europe, Latin America, and key parts of Asia and the Middle East, with growing interest as well in Africa. Sports were not of course the only story. Globally shared consumer items, like Hello Kitty merchandise (from Japan) or Barbie dolls (from the United States) or Sudoku puzzles (Japan again), created other common denominators for consumer interest. A variety of electronic and Internet games, developed in various countries, drew global populations. Even such an initially American item as the Disney theme park proved widely exportable, with successful ventures in Japan and (after some initial adjustment) Europe, while parks in the United States drew almost as much eager attention from middle-class Latin Americans as from Americans themselves as places to which one must take the family if one was a self-respecting parent. Global consumer culture showed in many ways. The spread of American fast food restaurants to cities in a whole variety of societies was a case in point. McDonald’s moved across borders first in 1967, with outlets in Canada and Puerto Rico; in 1971, a restaurant was opened in Tokyo, as “makadonaldo” spread to Japan. The globalizing Soviet Union accepted a branch in 1990, and by 1998 the chain was operating in 109 countries. Other fast food outlets were not far behind, along with many local imitators, significantly modifying the way many people ate and the kinds of food they found interesting. A few concessions proved necessary: beer at McDonald’s in France, more vegetarian fare in India, teriyaki burgers in Japan, and special meals during Ramadan in Morocco. But the basic concept remained the same, as the experience, once American, now became global. Beauty contests sprouted almost everywhere as well, from American origins in the 1920s (a few predecessor events dotted the later 19th century, also mainly in the United States but with a beach pageant in Belgium in 1888). Globalization began in 1951 with the establishment of the Miss World competition, followed

198  Contemporary Globalization by Miss Universe the next year. Later on, Miss International (1960), Miss Earth (2001, with purported environmental focus), and Miss Tourism Queen International (2004) joined in. Equally to the point, regional and national contests spread in India, many parts of Africa, Australia, and elsewhere. The idea was to sell a global standard of female beauty in venues that would have wide popular appeal – and the concept clearly caught on. While many people disapproved of the contests on grounds of traditional morality or feminist concerns about exploiting women’s bodies, there were women in virtually every region willing to participate. Middle Eastern interest grew, with a Lebanese winner of Miss International in 2002, Miss Turkey gaining Miss World, and a Muslim from Bosnia copping the first Miss Earth title. A Pakistani woman won Miss Bikini Universe in 2006, though this caused great controversy. The commercial aspects of Christmas spread widely, even in non-Christian areas like Turkey or the United Arab Emirates; having an excuse to shop and offer gifts to the family increasingly knew no borders. The notion of sending commercial greeting cards, initially a Western innovation, entered the celebration of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting and prayer. Birthday parties spread widely, and the American jingle “Happy Birthday” was translated into every major language. Cinco de Maio, long confined to Mexico and the United States, began to inspire some interest in places as varied as Australia and Japan. Other global consumer currencies included the adoption of blue jeans, at least for young people. Comic books spread widely, though they had somewhat different content and emphases in different cultures; Japanese contributions to comic books and related animation were particularly important. Shopping malls fanned out in many places: a mall in Dubai charmingly took the name Ibn Battuta, connecting current globalization with earlier world travel. Most cities also sported essentially similar types of luxury hotels, often run by chains such as Hilton or Marriott, another way in which consumer culture seemed to unite the (urban) world around many common standards and around a commitment to material comfort. Shared consumer forms and products could be misleading. Not everyone was interested, and of course many people lacked funds to indulge in consumerism of any sort, whether global or local. Consumer interests might overlap but offer different particulars. Japanese use of the national Disney Park included elaborate commitment to buying gifts for others, which was less prevalent at American version where souvenirs for the attending family were more important. Europeans were notoriously far more interested in using much of their extra income for long vacations, in contrast to Americans who placed greater emphasis on buying material objects. Global consumerism existed, in other words, but it had significant regional translations. Global critics also abounded, focused on excessive materialism and loss of local identities as well as what seemed to be clear violations of traditional Christian or Islamic morality. Interesting efforts emerged to combine global consumer

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  199 patterns with local customs. Thus, a beauty contest in Kerala, in southern India, tried to reward contestants who wore traditional costumes as part of their display and also could demonstrate knowledge of local epics; the effort misfired somewhat, because real traditionalists were not willing to enter any beauty contest, while the women who were eager knew little about Keralan language and literature. More successfully, the popular Indian film industry, called Bollywood, quite vigorously blended Indian themes and styles and Hollywood glitz; interestingly, by 2008, Bollywood approaches began to win Western audiences, which showed once more that global culture was moving in several directions. Global culture also helped create clear new problems even aside from the concerns of traditionalists, though the problems also reflected the importance and impact of the global standards. The advent of American television programming in some of the Pacific islands caused an increase of bulimia and anorexia among some teenage girls eager to make their figures look like what they were seeing on the screen. Global cultural tastes applied to restaurants and food choices helped spur the growing obesity problems now affecting almost every country. Less tangibly, global pressures raised intense concerns about established identities. African artists worried that their traditions were being distorted, as many shops turned out goods in styles that tourists expected. A Mexican novelist, Octavio Paz, proud of the culture that had emerged from a combination of native and Spanish elements, worried that global consumer culture was undermining the achievement, leading to shallow entertainments that had no real meaning. There were also some odd distortions. Images of Adolf Hitler became popular in Thailand by 2015, serving to advertise a variety of businesses, with the Nazi leader frequently decked out in amusing costumes. This reflected global knowledge: Hitler was of course not part of Thai experience. But it reflected as well a surprising level of global ignorance: Thai students learned nothing about the Holocaust, nothing about the evils of the Nazi regime. A “global” style of this sort prompted widespread shock and condemnation from other regions for whom Hitler was not amusing at all. At the same time, there were signs that global cultural initiatives might move out into an even wider range of topics. In the late 1990s, the United Nations became interested in the possibility of promoting and measuring global happiness. The move reflected not only the widespread attention to happiness in Western culture but also a movement in the Buddhist nation of Bhutan to develop an alternative, and more spiritual, definition of the emotion. In 2007, the United Nations began sponsoring an annual international happiness survey that gained growing publicity, and in 2012 endorsed an “International Happiness Day.” These efforts prompted some countries, like the United Arab Emirates, to devote new attention to the promotion and measurement of happiness locally. Governments in China and particularly India, concerned that their nations did not do too well in the happiness polls, began to take notice. At the same time, it remained true that cultural standards of happiness, not to mention actual levels,

200  Contemporary Globalization varied considerably from one region to the next. It was unclear whether some larger global consensus might emerge about a common emotional standard. A Global Youth Culture? Consumerism and the new opportunities for easy communication played the leading role in what some observers called a new kind of youth culture that crossed established boundaries. Other factors were involved, including the growing number of young people who mastered some level of English as a second language. Rising rates of study abroad contributed, though television and other new media played a greater role. The United States, Britain, and Australia remained prime destinations, but study abroad in places like Singapore and China accelerated as well. Shared styles of dress, including the ubiquitous blue jeans for both men and women, wide interest in patronizing outlets like McDonald’s, formed some of the most visible manifestations of the youth culture. Music could play a major role. Youth in many societies could share music, both through outlets like MTV that were broadcast widely around the world and through massive popular concerts. Bands from the United States and Britain inspired wide interest, but Japanese and South Korean performers won massive audiences as well. In East Africa by the 1980s, hip hop music styles spread from the United States and Jamaica, challenging local musical traditions. Many local artists performed, both in Swahili and English. Various local groups sponsored hip hop performances in support of anti-corruption drives or to promote campaigns against AIDS. But the overarching interest in hip hop involved young people who sought connection with their peers in other parts of the world, who faced similar problems including high rates of unemployment. One lyric, from Kenya, expressed the sentiment clearly: We’re rollin’ thick like the Bible quotin’ scriptures of survival Touchin’ masses upon arrival, hip hop is vital Represent your sphere, hip hop is global Represent your sphere, hip hop’s universal! Music could help youth form their own identity, though it might also relate to regional efforts to establish a contemporary African identity. Global youth culture could hit a region surprisingly suddenly. Vietnam decided on a more market-oriented economic policy in 1986, and the result generated both more foreign contact (including some study abroad) and growing prosperity for a local middle class. By 2000, a key result was the introduction of the word “teen” into the Vietnamese language to designate young people of both sexes who sought to follow global standards. They listened to global music (again, from various countries), they wore blue jeans, they watched similar television shows, and copied romantic fashion – all to the considerable dismay of the older generations, although the teens often redeemed themselves in part by

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  201 also studying hard. By 2010, an additional new word, “teen-teen,” was added to designate young people whose behavior was particularly distinctive. Global youth culture was not universal. Many youth in some regions might not be able to afford even a gesture toward global products. And some youth, in part because of joblessness but also from cultural resistance, might turn against global fashions with a vengeance. By 2015, the ranks of the terrorist group ISIS, or Daesh, swelled with young people drawn from many countries, eager to attack global standards and Western symbols alike as decadent and corrupt. The Global Environment The newest and possibly most troubling aspect of globalization by the later 20th century involved environmental impacts. Humans had altered, and often dramatically worsened, the environment before, from the rise of agriculture onward, but mainly on a local or regional basis. With industrialization in the later 19th century, the needs of factories or consumers in one place could prompt changes in other regions that in turn deteriorated the environment. Thus, we have seen how the effort to meet Western demand for vegetable oil or coffee led to the expansion of plantations in West Africa or Brazil that reduced local vegetation and damaged water supply. The spread of rubber plantations in Brazil had the same effect. Clearly, the Western-dominated global economy had begun to introduce serious environmental change well before the late 20th century. The fact that decisions in one region could affect environments in another was a clear sign of accelerating international exchange, meshing with the idea of the 1850s as the launch pad for modern globalization; even the level of global contact that developed after 1500 had generated environmental change. But more literally global environmental deterioration awaited the later 20th century. It was at this point that activities in one region might literally affect conditions for the entire planet. Attempts to curb local factory pollution by creating tall smokestacks helped spread pollutants to distant areas – to Canadian forests from the United States Midwest, or to Scandinavian forests from the German Ruhr, through the phenomenon of acid rain. Use of various chemicals for consumer products in various parts of the world began to create dangerous gaps in the ozone layer, another global result. Reduction of the rain forests to meet global demand for beef and other products, plus growing carbon emissions from expanding factories and automobile use, began to heighten the phenomenon of global warming and an attendant reduction in the icecaps in the Arctic and in Antarctica alike. Never before had such widespread climate and pollution impacts resulted from human activity. And of course regional impacts from global activity accelerated as well. The later 20th century was dotted with oil spills from wrecked supertankers that could foul water, shores, and animal life in places like Alaska or Spain or Malaysia. Many foreign-owned manufacturing plants spilled chemical pollutants

202  Contemporary Globalization in Mexico or Indonesia. An American factory in Bhopal, India, exploded, causing tremendous local maiming and loss of life. A nuclear accident in the Soviet Union spread radiation to a number of surrounding countries. International political efforts, as well as domestic regulations, fanned out to try to deal with what was effectively an environmental globalization. While the first effort to organize international environmental discussion occurred in Sweden in 1972, conferences on environmental controls increased from by the 1980s and thereafter. The 1andmark Montreal Agreement of 1987, banning fluorocarbons and other chemicals that were damaging the ozone layer, was a huge step forward, actually leading to measurable improvements in ozone protection. In 1997, a major conference in Kyoto, Japan, attempted a wider arrangement, setting limits on carbon emissions in order to curtail global warming; but several key nations refused to sign on and it was not clear that the limitations would be effective in any event. At the same time, vigorous debates occurred about how great the crisis was – there was some scientific dispute – and about who should take the lead: developing nations wanted the wealthy nations to pitch in first, without impeding their own growth plans, whereas the older industrial centers hesitated to push too far unless other significant polluters (like China, which took second place to the United States by the 21st century) faced up as well. A more ambitious global effort produced a new Paris Agreement in 2015, in which 198 countries discussed efforts to reform energy use in order to keep global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius, and hopefully less. By 2017, 125 countries had signed on, including leaders in both the advanced industrial and developing world – in principle, bridging one of the most challenging divisions of interest. The achievement was impressive, but implementation was left to individual countries and follow-up meetings, while featuring renewed pledges, suggested that even some of the most enthusiastic participants, like Germany, were having trouble making progress. Further, some of the energyproducing leaders, like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, began to push back against efforts to limit fossil fuels, and under new President Donald Trump the United States vowed to pull out of the agreement altogether, Clearly, environmental impacts and responses constituted one of the clearest question marks of the newest phase of globalization. Global Protest Contemporary globalization brought one final innovation, from the late 1990s onward: an attempt to develop protest forms that would directly confront the major features of globalization. Obviously, all sorts of groups worried about major aspects of globalization or about the process as a whole. Many labor unions were concerned about the loss of jobs to lower-paying regions. A number of INGOs tried to tackle environmental standards. Culture critics bemoaned the

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  203 inroads of foreign influences on local traditions: a key theme of many writers, from Japan to Mexico to West Africa, involved a loss of identity as meaningful cultures gave way to faceless and shallow consumerism and sexual exploitation. Fundamentalist religious groups, whether Christian or Islamic or Hindu, often directly combated global cultural standards, while also often attracting groups that were suffering economically from foreign competition. A host of local nationalisms gained new strength – the surge of Scottish nationalism is an example – not just because of the appeal of a glorious regional past but because a heightened local identity might counteract global forces. Globalization as a source of protest and concern was hardly new. Nevertheless, it was a testimony to the new power and sweep of globalization that an explicit protest movement also emerged. Extensive riots erupted in Seattle in 1999 around meetings of the World Trade Organization designed to lower barriers to international trade. Protesters came from many parts of the world. They included environmentalists, opponents of consumerism, advocates for the protection of workers and working conditions, and partisans of traditional identities. They embraced many who saw globalization as a system for exploiting the poorer regions of the world while exacerbating economic inequalities. As one participant put it, “protesters included: French farmers, Korean greens [environmentalists], Canadian wheat growers, Mexican environmentalists, Chinese dissidents, Ecuadorian anti-dam organization, U’wa tribes’ people from the Columbian rainforest, and British campaigners against genetically modified foods.” Motives were diverse, and not always entirely compatible: but there was agreement on a globalization target and a specific focus on institutions that seemed most responsible for the acceleration of the process. At least in the short run, the protests had little impact other than to provoke massive security arrangements at subsequent global gatherings. But the efforts persisted: most meetings of the World Bank or by 2009 the Group of 20 saw major local demonstrations, drawing people from various places united in their sense that globalization was moving the world in the wrong direction. The efforts, stemming from so many different parts of the world, were themselves a backhanded illustration of globalization itself. Regional Patterns From the mid-20th century onward, contemporary globalization sparked various kinds of regional response – as had been the case in earlier intensifications as well. Crucial divisions continued along economic fault lines. Despite important changes in regional alignments, some areas were still clearly exploited in the global economy, pressed to offer cheap raw materials or other products based on low-wage labor, often indeed seeking to send workers abroad to earn precious revenue. Some regions also lacked wide access to the new global technologies – this was particularly true for areas that remained predominantly rural. In 2015,

204  Contemporary Globalization about 40 percent of the world’s population had Internet access – up from just 1 percent 20 years before, a huge change – but still short of majority. A crucial regional issue for the contemporary phase of globalization involved the extent to which the process reduced Western domination – a core feature of the kind of global system that had developed in the later 19th century. Evidence was frankly mixed. The industrialization of countries like China or India, particularly from the final 20th century decades onward, transformed the extent to which the global economy was simply a Western playpen with only a few outliers such as Japan. Global consumer culture now reflected innovations from East Asia, Latin America, India, and elsewhere, though of course a strong Western role remained. The same applied to science, with the increasing globalization of research and the emergence of key centers outside the West and Japan. As new nations emerged with decolonization, the General Assembly of the United Nations became a true global body, unlike the League of Nation which had operated amid extensive Western imperial holdings. Yet the Western voice remained, and it could complicate responses. We have seen that many regions, from Africa through the Middle East to parts of East Asia, viewed human rights pressures as thinly veiled political interventions by the West. Many global financial institutions, of the sort established at the end of World War II, continued to emphasize Western leadership and standards: thus, the head of the International Monetary Fund was always European. Loans from these agencies frequently imposed stringent requirements on recipients, forcing reductions in government spending to improve credit ratings; not surprisingly, recipients in turn complained that Western banking interests were taking precedence over local prosperity – a recurrent objection from countries such as Argentina. Global industrialization was a reality, and partly reflected in the new “Group of 20” set up to deal with the 2008 recession. But the older “group of 7” continued to meet more frequently, and it had only one non-Western member, Japan. The United Nations Security Council had five permanent members, each with veto power, and three of them were Western. The list goes on. Globalization was decidedly less West-leaning than it had been, but ironically it was arguably not fully global. And this in turn conditioned responses in many ways. Distinctive regional patterns reflected other issues as well. China, from 1978 onward, became an eager global participant – to an extent literally unprecedented in the nation’s rich history. Delegations frequently traveled abroad, international visitors swelled, participation in the global economy and even consumerism steadily expanded. But the Chinese state, bent on preserving the authoritarian political system, participated more gingerly. At times, a desire to maintain secrecy and national control even interfered with full collaboration with agencies such as the World Health Organization. We have seen that the United States had its own concerns about global politics, characteristically shying away from signing international conventions that might limit national sovereignty. Thus, the nation did not accept the authority

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  205 of the new World Criminal Court, called upon, among other things, to deal with war crimes. The measure outlawing land mines, though supported by many American activists, similarly did not win government approval. Several environmental agreements, although negotiated by the executive branch, failed to gain congressional assent and then the nation pulled out of the Paris Agreement entirely (however, many states and private groups maintained a commitment, and the United States itself rejoined in 2021). Japan, another active global participant in many respects, was distinctively reluctant to accept significant immigration – despite a declining and ageing population. Preservation of considerable ethnic purity and the strong sense of national community took precedence, though there were some signs of change. Participation in global artistic movements varied, again reflecting regional tastes. Exhibitions of “modern” art styles, largely abstract, by the early 21st century readily featured artists from the West, from Russia, from Latin America, from Japan and Korea, from some parts of Africa. But artistic styles in places like India and the Middle East, although lively, remained more localized. Regional differentiation applied less, of course, to the most widespread urban architecture that shaped city centers almost everywhere. Even international sports had some regional flavoring. India, though avid for international cricket, did not participate strongly in the events of the Olympic games. Women’s athletic outlets were limited in the Middle East, though there were still a few international performers. The United States maintained its eccentric preference for football over global soccer, despite some increased interest. Here, as in other categories, regional twists and constraints were vital companions of globalization, shaping it in different ways, even limiting it in some important cases. Figuring out why different regions stressed particular hesitations or modifications, and assessing the results, adds to the challenge of contemporary global analysis. Global Accumulations and Innovations It is important not to lose sight of the bigger picture of globalization in contemporary world history, alongside both the obvious problems and larger regional variants. Contemporary globalization – or the contemporary phase, depending on how one views historical antecedents – involved two clearly novel elements – the global environmental impact and embryonic global protest – and a massive acceleration and expansion of more established patterns, notably in the areas of technology, language, and culture. Significant changes in organization and global politics added in, and there were some redefinitions of earlier staples like migration and disease transmission. Even global food access, though not new, now expanded its impact through the global epidemic of obesity. The overall combination provided powerful arguments for those – whether historians, other social

206  Contemporary Globalization scientists, or simply ordinary observers including of course the protesters – who felt that a fundamental transformation was underway that would measurably differentiate the world’s present and future from its past. Global innovation could be welcomed by optimists who saw in it a source of greater overall prosperity and of political counterweights to traditional evils like the oppression of women or the denial of basic human rights. It would be bemoaned by those who saw both economic and cultural deterioration. The two groups might clash endlessly over their evaluations, but they would ironically agree that something massive was in the works. The undeniable changes in globalization over the past 70 years revive the basic historical question: did they add up to an unprecedented framework, reducing prior history to mere global backdrop, or were they more accurately seen as the latest outcropping of a process that had begun earlier? The debate, if not pressed too far, can usefully focus on an evaluation of the nature of change and attendant causation. But it must also take into account a variety of even more recent shifts, emerging during the decade after the financial crisis of 2008, which raised the possibility that yet another transition, and possibly a real retreat, was taking shape. The globalization process, never smooth, seemed to be entering a more difficult phase. Finally, historical judgments must combine with more personal evaluations: how does a grasp of the evolution of globalization affect individuals – like the readers of this book? Do we need to be discussing the nature of responsible global citizenship, as some of the new global historians argue, and what would the components be? Further Readings Manfred Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2003); Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York, 2002). Bruce Mazlish and Alfred D. Chandler, Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History (Cambridge, 2005); Paul Doremus, William W. Keller, Louis Pauley, and Simon Reich, The Myth of the Global Corporation (Princeton, NJ, 1998); James Macdonald, When Globalization Fails: The Rise and Fall of Pax Americana (New York, 2015); Slobodian Quinn, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA, 2020). Theodore Von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization: The Twentieth Century in Global Perspective (New York, 2002); Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (New York, 2002); Barrow Elmore, Citizen Coke: The Making of Global Capitalism (New York, 2015); Stephen Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress (New York, 2019); Matthew Connolly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Contain World Population (Cambridge, MA, 2008). James Watson, Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia (Palo Alto, CA, 2006); Michael Denning, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World

Contemporary Globalization since the 1940s  207 Music Revolution (London, 2015); Matthew Karush, Musicians in Transit: Argentina and the Globalization of Popular Music (Durham, NC, 2016); John Savage, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture (New York, 2007); Stephen Rees, American Films Abroad: Hollywood’s Domination of the World’s Movie Screens from the 1890s to the Present (Jefferson, NC, 2007); Alistair Pennycock, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (Saddle River, NJ, 1995); David Block, Globalization and Language Teaching (London, 2002); Maggie Andrews and Mary Talbott, eds., All the World and Her Husband: Women in Twentieth-Century Consumer Culture (London, 2000): John Boh and Frank J. Lechner, World Culture: Origins and Consequences (Oxford, 2005); Alye Weingaum and others, The Modern Girl and the World: Consumption, Modernity and Globalization (Durham, NC, 2008); Alan Wells, Picture-Tube Imperialism? The Impact of U.S. Television in Latin America (New York, 1972); Benjamin Orlove, The Lure of the Foreign: Impact Goods in Postcolonial Latin America (Ann Arbor, MI, 1997); Mwenda Ntarangwi, East African Hip Hop: Youth Culture and Globalization (Urbana, IL, 2009); Alan C. Lew, C. Michael Hall, and Dalien Timothy, World Geography of Travel and Tourism (Oxford, 2008); Euny Hong, The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World through Pop Culture (New York, 2014). On the Cold War and globalization, see H.G. Lynn, “Globalization and the Cold War,” in Oxford Handbook of the Cold War, eds. Richard Immerman and Petra Goedde, pp. 584–604 (Oxford, 2013); Yale Richmond, Cultural Change and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (College Park, PA, 2003); Sam Lebovic, A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization (Cambridge, MA, 2022); Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA, 2004). Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2000); Andresen Steiner, Elie Boasson, and Geir Honneland, International Environmental Agreements: An Introduction (New York, 2012); Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Philadelphia, PA, 2002); Peter N. Stearns, Human Rights in World History (2nd ed., New York, 2022) and Global Outrage: The Impact of World Opinion in Contemporary History (Oxford, 2005); World Bank, Traditional and Modern Medicine in the Context of Globalization (Washington, DC, 2004).

10 A New Retreat? The Signs of Disruption in the 21st Century

From the 2008 to 2009 financial crisis onward, signs of new troubles for many aspects of globalization intensified. Objections surfaced from many directions. Groups in a number of Western societies, rightly or wrongly convinced that globalization was responsible for transferring their jobs to low-wage centers, began to flex their muscle, in some cases prompting new support for higher tariffs on world trade. High-sounding environmental agreements, though widely hailed, saw most countries fail to live up to their pledges, in favor of continued attention to national economic growth. Pushback against global human rights efforts – or what many saw as Western-dominated campaigns, advanced around a number of issues. Steep new barriers against global communication, and particularly the construction of the “Great Firewall” in China after 2013, called a basic staple of contemporary globalization into question. Then the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, beginning in 2020, though in one sense a familiar feature of global contacts, threw all sorts of arrangements into question, from regular global supply chains to the capacity simply to visit other countries. Clearly, at the least, contemporary globalization was entering into a new period of uncertainty or transition, and some wondered if the whole process was being called into question – indeed a few journalists talked of the end of globalization, with headlines about the “death” of the process. Assessing these developments over the past two decades involves at least three complications. First, as discussed in the next section: globalization was most certainly not coming to a close. Many aspects held firm or even accelerated. The new period was much less reactive than the post-World War I retrenchment had been, at least so far. New complications were definitely emerging, but the overall evaluation requires nuance. Second, the partial reconsideration of globalization was combined with a vigorous dispute over leadership. A number of societies, headed by China and Russia, sought to contest what they saw as the excessive global influence of the United States, talking of the need for a more multipolar structure. While some of this dispute involved the contrast between authoritarian and more democratic regimes, a number of democracies, such as India, also showed some sympathy DOI: 10.4324/9781003439615-15

A New Retreat?  209 for the effort. Sorting out the interaction between retrenchment and power struggle is no easy task. Finally, there is the issue of perspective. Historians can never be entirely comfortable evaluating developments that have taken shape over the most recent decade and a half because of the difficulty of applying perspective. This chapter will briefly cite some undeniable changes since 2008, though some impressive continuities as well. It will suggest that, at the least, a new transition has arrived. But whether basic transformations are in the offing is a question that cannot yet be answered, simply because it is simply too soon to judge their seriousness or durability. We can ask some good questions about current trends, but we cannot predict their future. More of the Same Many features of globalization continued to operate strongly into the second quarter of the 21st century. The Internet reached growing global audiences; consumerism advanced widely with the growth of middle classes in places in China and India; the world’s environmental challenge expanded steadily. Protests against globalization continued, and intellectual or academic groups in many countries continued to warn against globalization’s impact on the environment or on the world’s poor or on cherished cultural identities; but much of this also had a familiar ring. It was not at all new for globalization to be simultaneously admired and vilified. Many indices reflected an ongoing globalization trend: thus, flows of trade, capital, information, and people all continued to rise. By 2017, international tourism was growing at an unprecedented pace, while free calls over the Internet powered strong growth in international communications. Several developments offered particularly striking evidence of globalization’s continued advance. By 2016, for example, Netflix had become a global company, with operations in 190 countries. Rather than simply selling American films and shows to a global audience – which had been the prevailing pattern before – Netflix pioneered a more ambitious venture, producing major shows in a number of countries and then distributing them widely. The Netflix list of top hits thus included a Japanese series on tidying (a particular global smash hit), a British baking show, an Australian comedy, and productions from Spain, Italy, Turkey, and elsewhere. A Brazilian series won half its audience outside Brazil. A show about Australian lesbians won many viewers in India. As recently as 2021, the Netflix smash hit, Squid Game, the first foreign production ever to win the top television award in the United States, was a Korean product. All this was impressive on two counts: first, of course, Netflix became a leading example of a true multinational, with creative activities in all sorts of countries and sales literally around the world. But second, the success showed the power of cultural globalization in a period when some other evidence suggested new kinds of intolerance.

210  Contemporary Globalization Facebook and other social media continued their global ascent, joined now by the Chinese-based service, Tik Tok, which won huge popularity among young people in the West. This new facet of cultural globalization brought both opportunities and problems in its wake. Many people appreciated the ability quickly to establish links with acquaintances in many countries, sometimes people whom they had never met. Global exchanges of selfies and other personal information could create important ties across regional boundaries. But the same facilities allowed private and government operatives to set up fake accounts, distributing misinformation that played a major role in internal politics and conflicts. Russia and other countries used social media accounts to exacerbate partisan tensions in Ukraine, France, the United States, and elsewhere, sometimes playing a perceptible role in election results. This was globalization of a new sort, and authorities struggled to develop effective countermeasures. Social media also played a growing role in global terrorism. Terrorists associated with Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and other organizations that claimed to represent a radical version of Islam used social media to indoctrinate partners in many countries. Many of the terrorist acts carried out by single individuals or small groups in several Western nations simply involved people who had been persuaded by social media sites and instructed about how to use homemade bombs or vehicles to create chaos; many of them had never had any personal contact with the organizations that claimed sponsorship. The same kinds of social media links began to support White nationalist activity after about 2015, with a measurable increase in acts of violence, in several countries including the United States, the clear result. A White nationalist attack on two New Zealand mosques in 2019 thus involved an individual who had traveled to meet other White nationalists in Europe but whose main inspiration came from news about other acts of violence plus messages and symbols displayed on the Internet; and the murderer carefully recorded and streamed his own attacks, and his display of the White nationalist hand signal, on YouTube and elsewhere in hopes of inspiring others. Both these sources of violence – from individuals who claimed radical Islamic representation and from White nationalists – were directed against globalization, but they actively utilized the facilities globalization had created. New Chinese initiatives contributed to new levels of globalization after 2013, though again with some interesting implications. In that year, the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, announced an ambitious Belt and Road project designed to promote new links between the Chinese economy and a number of other regions – in central and southeast Asia, in eastern Europe, and in various parts of Africa. The huge program interestingly invoked past global trade routes – it was sometimes called the Silk Road Economic Belt – but in fact its scope was unprecedented. The initiative focused primarily on massive infrastructure investments to create new rails and roads from China outward – ultimately, a road would run directly from China to Europe for the first time. Electric transmission lines and telecommunications networks also played an important role. But the

A New Retreat?  211 overall initiatives also involved constructing new port facilities in Southeast Asia, Greece, and Africa, and Chinese enterprises were active in Latin America as well. Chinese planners referred to a “Maritime Silk Road” to cover this aspect of the operation. Investments approximated a trillion dollars by 2019, with the promise of more to come. Some of the financing (and construction work) came directly from China, some of it represented loans that participating countries would ultimately have to pay back. Three aspects of this massive project were important. First, it was a genuine extension of global links that potentially brought regions like Mongolia and Central Asia into the globalization process more fully than ever before. Chinese leaders, in fact, cast themselves as major proponents of economic globalization overall. Second, it testified to the obvious fact that China, and not just the West and Japan, had become a major global player, creating new concerns about competition in the established centers. And third, to some critics at least, it suggested a new form of economic colonialism, particularly involving countries whose debts might place them effectively under Chinese control. Some countries, indeed, pulled back from some of the projects because of this issue. The early 21st century thus saw a number of crucial developments that built on the globalization framework created in the later 20th century but with important innovations and problems attached. Finally, the most basic staple of globalization continued to display real strength, despite some new confusions: international trade continued to grow, though some elements faltered a bit when the Covid epidemic first struck. Exchanges of goods and services, as well as information, either maintained early 21st century levels or expanded. A number of countries, like Vietnam, gained new opportunities to produce for global markets. As many countries sought to promote measures combatting climate change, for example encouraging the production of electric cars, they actually depended on increasing the import of materials vital for making batteries and lightweight metals like aluminum. The notion that economic globalization was retreating was simply incorrect – though there were certainly some new issues. A New Globalization Crisis? At the same time, several developments created new barriers or potential barriers to globalization’s advance. The results, by 2024, were not yet as severe as those that had emerged after World War I, but they raised some similar questions about a possible retreat from global engagement. The lingering effects of global recession constituted one countercurrent; new or enhanced patterns of immigration and immigration resistance formed another; the results of the Covid pandemic, though complex, may have constituted a third. The global recession that began in the United States in 2007–8 was the world’s worst economic crisis since the Depression of the 1930s. It centered

212  Contemporary Globalization initially on overexpansion of bank investments, particularly in shaky real estate assets. Several American financial firms collapsed and many others had to be shored up by government support; Britain suffered many of the same woes. The financial collapse quickly, though briefly, reduced world trade levels and caused massive unemployment and wage reductions in many Western countries. Conditions in newer industrial economies such as China and Brazil were less dire, but ultimately growth slowed in these centers as well. Global recovery was slow and uneven, as late as 2016. Globalization clearly played a role in the crisis. It certainly helped explain why problems in one sector, like the United States, quickly became global issues – the same kind of linkage that had been part of the world economic network since the 1870s and that had showed up again in the 1930s. Some analysts contended that new profits in Middle Eastern and Asian economies prompted an effort to seek secure investments in Western real estate, which in turn contributed directly to this particular financial setback. The crisis did not reverse economic globalization. Indeed, in contrast to reactions in the early 1930s, few countries tried to steer a completely independent course or pull out of global trade arrangements. Several trade agreements actually expanded. Canada signed several new accords. An ambitious Pacific Partnership created a new trade alliance involving Canada, Japan, Vietnam, Mexico, and seven other countries, though the United States, which had initially helped spur negotiations as a means of countering Chinese trade influence, pulled out. And of course, China’s own arrangements, with the Belt and Road initiative, expanded partnerships as well. More broadly, efforts to organize the new “group of 20” reflected recognition both of the continued importance of global coordination and the need to acknowledge the significance of the newer industrial powers. But the poor economic climate undoubtedly increased anxiety about global economic exposure. Immigration became another flash point. New problems most obviously surfaced in the Middle East and Europe. Wars and civil wars in several Middle Eastern countries (plus Afghanistan) prompted massive flights by refugees. At the same time, political crises and violence in several parts of sub-Saharan Africa, along with poverty and worsening climate conditions, prompted another stream of migrants. By 2018, as many as 68 million people had fled their homes – the most massive refugee influx since World War II. Many of them sheltered in povertystricken camps in neighboring countries: Jordan, Turkey, Kenya, and so on. But many made their way, or sought to make their way, into Europe. Overcrowded boats sought to reach Italy or other destinations from North Africa. Other refugees streamed into southeastern Europe through Greece. Over a million migrants – mainly Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan – reached Europe during 2015 alone. Some people saw a similar crisis affecting the United States, where by 2016 about 11 million people were residing in the country illegally. Assessment here was difficult, and highly political. Many “illegals” had been in the country a

A New Retreat?  213 long time. The rate of illegal entry was not massively increasing – indeed the number of Mexicans with unauthorized entry had declined. And illegals came from a number of places, not just along the southern border, most commonly overstaying travel and student visas. The United States had lower levels of immigration, in fact, than several other countries (such as Canada), lower also than many Americans assumed: one poll showed that Americans believed that about 30 percent of their population was foreign born, though the reality was less than 15 percent. But to some Americans, immigration constituted a clear problem, with some of the same overtones that immigration was creating in Europe. New levels of violence, poor governance, and poverty in some Central American and Caribbean countries generated efforts to gain entry through the southern border of the United States – a highly visible train of migrants not totally unlike the waves newly affecting Europe. Immigration had long been part of globalization. It provided new sources of labor – potentially welcome in Western nations with low birth rates – and in some cases at least new sources of entrepreneurial vigor. But immigration had also frequently raised warning flags. How many newcomers could a society handle? Were the immigrants bringing cultures that could not easily be integrated into the national mainstream? Muslim immigrants were often seen as raising particular cultural issues to countries that were majority Christian and where fears about terrorism added another component. Perhaps most obviously, the new refugee crises added to debates about immigration that were already simmering. France, 10 percent Muslim already, wondered about integration into a national culture that was officially secular. Britain, which had received many immigrants from Eastern Europe through membership in the European Union, worried about Poles and Lithuanians. East-central European countries like Hungary, despite no recent history of receiving significant immigration, claimed to be newly uncomfortable. Scandinavian countries, famous for generous social welfare policies, increasingly restricted immigrant access and maltreated some existing groups. By the second decade of the 21st century, clearly, economic doldrums and uncertainties, highlighted by the Great Recession and its slow repair, could combine with new-old concerns about immigration and cultural diversity to create important uncertainties about key aspects of globalization. The result showed up in several kinds of resistance that marked the decade as, at best, a mixture of advance and retreat for the globalization process overall. The Rise of Authoritarianism Political democracy was unquestionably losing ground in many parts of the world under the strain of economic uncertainty and, arguably, weak leadership from the democratic societies themselves. The expansion of authoritarianism was impressive and it had direct impact on key aspects of globalization.

214  Contemporary Globalization Thus, authoritarian controls increased in Russia. Risings in several Middle Eastern countries, beginning in 2010 in the so-called Arab Spring, although liberal in initial inspiration, quickly led to renewed authoritarianism in places like Egypt while confirming authoritarian rule in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Turkey, without eliminating democratic forms, also moved in the authoritarian direction, arresting thousands of political opponents and cutting into freedoms of the press. Finally, the Chinese regime, already firmly anti-liberal, increased its authoritarian controls, again cracking down on real or imagined dissidents (including some Muslim minorities) and using technology to track loyalty to the regime. And this new trend, important in its own right, directly impinged on political and cultural aspects of globalization. Thus, resurgent authoritarianism led to many measures against international agencies, including groups seeking to promote democracy and human rights. Russian law made it virtually impossible for international NGOs like Amnesty International to operate. The new Egyptian regime threw out many such groups and arrested some leaders. Missionary religious activities faced new restrictions as well. The Russian government, allied with the Orthodox Church, harassed minority Protestant groups. Chinese restrictions on religious activity not under government control increased. Even more important was the concerted effort to control global information technology. China imposed strict controls over the Internet, cutting most Chinese citizens off from the global services. Government agencies not only patrolled website content but also monitored individual access – creating the most advanced system of this sort in the world. Operations like Wikipedia were excluded entirely in a program often referred to as the Great Firewall. Resistance to global human rights arguments became steadily more pronounced, and the Chinese government also interfered with many international companies, usually on grounds of national security. The Chinese state even tried to discipline dissident opinions outside China, particularly when Chinese nationals were involved. Russia and Vietnam also developed more sophisticated controls over the global Internet, monitoring content and use and arresting people who posted materials critical of the regimes. In 2019, a new Vietnamese law required global technology firms with operations in the country to store data locally and to pledge to remove offending content within 24 hours after receiving a request from the state. These developments obviously posed a huge dilemma for the global Internet giants but most of them, eager for business, kowtowed to the limitations imposed. Google, for example, had pulled out of China after clashes with the government. But in 2018, it began to arrange a return, based on compliance with state censorship. Hollywood movie makers, similarly, showed a willingness to tailor many new movies to Chinese requirements, maintaining global links but with new constraints. All of this did not constitute an attack on globalization as a whole. Countries like China and Vietnam eagerly participated in economic globalization (though

A New Retreat?  215 with some national policy twists) and had clearly profited from their involvement. Global consumer interests continued to advance in these regions. But the rise of authoritarianism and the very real limitations on key aspects of globalization did raise some new questions. At the least, it seemed highly likely that the globalized world would be more clearly divided between democratic and authoritarian regions than had been the case after the end of the Cold War. Further, the clash could lead to new restrictions in some democratic countries as well. In the United States, growing fears about Chinese power prompted new efforts to restrict the flow of Chinese students and scholars and Chinese-based operations such as Tik Tok, along with tighter regulations over other Chinese businesses and investments. New global divisions also showed up in domains that might seem unrelated to the political sphere. Thus, a major development in some parts of the world in the later 20th century toward growing acknowledgement of gay rights and even gay marriage became something of a global flashpoint in the climate of the early 21st century. Though debated, acceptance of new rights spread rapidly in the Western world. The cause was eagerly picked up by many INGOs, including Amnesty International. Though religious objections continued in many Latin American and African countries, there were some new initiatives; Taiwan for example became the first Asian country to accept gay marriage, and prejudices began to ease in Japan. And both laws and courts in India clearly responded to the new concerns. On the other hand, many authoritarian regimes tightened their efforts to repress homosexuals and explicitly opposed any international movement (however, significantly, China became more tolerant from 1997 onward). Authoritarian regimes in the Middle East stiffened restrictions, already quite severe. Russia, even more notably, visibly cracked down with new laws such as a 2013 decree “for the purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values” and with some highly publicized arrests, its regime seeking to play a role in resisting any international gay rights movement. And in 2019, the nation of Brunei, a smaller authoritarian case, introduced death by stoning for male homosexual acts, though it refrained from enforcement. Uganda adopted newly harsh policies in 2023. For the moment, as least, this aspect of the human rights effort reflected global tensions more than globalization, as key regions resisted Western initiatives with new vigor. Global gay rights raised issues beyond the authoritarian–liberal divide, but it did serve to illustrate the kind of complication that new political divisions in the world posed for what some groups hoped to establish as new global standards. Here, clearly, was an important new complexity on the global horizon. New Resistance in the West: A Resurgence of Nationalism Doubts about globalization were hardly new in Western society. Many Western countries had played a role in globalization’s retreat after World War I and particularly during the depression. Western nationalism, emerging about the same

216  Contemporary Globalization time as 19th-century globalization itself, had often exerted counterpressures – as the Nazi experience had vividly demonstrated, though in extreme form. After World War II, however, Western countries had committed strongly and systematically to the development of the new globalization framework, particularly in the agreements that shaped economic activities from the late 1940s onward. Advocacy of global human rights and participation in global consumerism and sports were other signs of deep involvement. Thus, it was particularly noteworthy that new signs of hesitancy began to emerge after about 2010, along with arguably a clear reduction in Western capacities for global guidance. A number of problems seemed to coalesce. First, the deep effects of the Great Recession combined, in many countries, with persistent problems of unemployment (as in France) or longer-term wage stagnation (in the United States). Globalization was widely blamed for the loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs, though most experts argued that the problems went beyond globalization alone. Growing economic inequality came in for attack as well. Second, levels of immigration (Muslim, East European, and Hispanic depending on the region involved) created new concerns about cultural identity, with many people arguing that diverse communities were undercutting the social role of White people and at least residual Christian values. Claims – and misinformation – about immigrants and crime fed this concern, which was greatest, ironically, in rural and smalltown regions where actual immigration levels were relatively low. Finally, albeit more vaguely, the increasingly visible role of Asian societies – and most obviously, China – in global leadership raised questions about whether the whole globalization process was threatening an appropriate place for the West. New levels of concern about globalization showed up in several domains. Most generally, the emergence of strong so-called populist political minorities, vigorously opposed to further immigration and in some cases vowing to send some existing immigrants back home, signaled a more adverse climate. The new populism was deeply suspicious of the global commitments of existing elites. Populist minorities gained ground in Germany, Sweden, Italy, and several other European countries, and arguably surfaced as part of the groundswell of support for Donald Trump in the United States. Some of the heightened anger was directed not just at immigrants but at global institutions more generally. Thus, in 2017 a leader in global finance worried that “we may be at a point where globalization is ending and where provincialism and nationalism are taking hold.” Concerns were heightened by the emergence of regimes in parts of east-central Europe that were not only anti-immigrant but also bent on installing greater authoritarianism. Some of these currents went beyond specific issues to a more general feeling that somehow globalization had become an uncontrollable force, undermining the capacities of communities or even nations to forge their own destinies. Thus, in Britain some of the moves against transnational institutions specifically promised to “restore full self-government.”

A New Retreat?  217 More specific anti-global moves, often translating more general populist hostility, had three major facets. First, specifically in Britain, a 2016 referendum yielded a 52 percent majority for pulling the nation out of the European Union, in a move widely known as Brexit. The vote was not, directly, about globalization; indeed many “Leave” advocates argued that an independent Britain would be able to forge new deals in the global economy. But the vote crystallized many broader concerns, particularly about immigrants and cultural identity but also about economic malaise and the sense of loss of control. Second, many Western societies sought new measures to restrict immigration. The European Union negotiated a variety of agreements with countries like Turkey and Libya to slow the entrance of migrant groups – often, at very real cost to the safety of migrants themselves. Under Donald Trump, American immigration quotas were reduced and entry from some Islamic-majority countries was banned while active discussion of a “wall” at the southern border roiled national politics, and the ensuing Biden administration, while it ceased efforts on the wall, continued high levels of deportation. These moves were not uniform across the West. Canada, for example, with a higher immigrant percentage than most Western countries including the United States, maintained a more welcoming stance, though with policies that favored migration of skilled groups primarily. Third, if somewhat haltingly, the United States now took a lead in seeking new restrictions on trade with China. The nation imposed new tariffs on a number of Chinese goods, and began to try to promote domestic manufacturing of key items like computer chips to reduce its dependence on foreign imports. While Western Europe was reluctant to follow the United States lead, and more eager to maintain vigorous economic links with China, there were some new concerns in this camp as well. What could be characterized as anti-globalization moves in the United States and elsewhere were carried out along with a vigorous assertion of nationalism and national self-interest and, in the minds of some observers, a fairly obvious subtext of White racism as well. This reaction was not uniform: the French president, for example, distinguished between selfish, belligerent nationalism and an enlightened patriotism that was compatible with commitment to humanity as a whole. Hostility to racism advanced clearly as well. For example, a number of Western countries began returning some of the artistic objects that had been stolen from Africa and elsewhere in the 19th century. Still, for the moment, the Western commitment to globalization had clearly become more complex. The Covid Pandemic The first cases of Covid-19 occurred in China in December, 2019; the disease was identified by the World Health Organization in January of the following year. While there was some brief hope that the problem could be contained – American authorities were optimistic into February – the usual sinews of

218  Contemporary Globalization globalization, in international travel and trade, quickly carried it into other parts of the world. Major incidence occurred in Western Europe and soon the United States; Latin America and India were hit hard. By early 2023, over 750 million people worldwide had contracted the disease. Carried by globalization, the pandemic revealed both strengths and weaknesses in the global system – though the weaknesses were far more obvious. This was the most serious rapid epidemic than anything since the Spanish flu of 1918–9, but it entered a world that was far less accustomed to this kind of problem. Earlier threats, like SARS, had been much more readily handled. In face of Covid, however, the World Health Organization proved fairly powerless, partly because it took time to develop accurate data, but even more because individual nations insisted on going their own way – rather like the response to the global depression of the 1930s. Policies varied widely; some governments, including China, did not cooperate fully or provide accurate data; nationalist claims and attacks, including anti-Asian slurs, complicated the situation still further. Even as effective medicines became available, many countries consulted their own interest first, trying to gobble up as much available supply as possible; poor nations suffered in consequence (though Africa, with a younger population, did not fare as badly as many predicted). Additional disruptions of global relationships were quick and extensive. Global travel and air traffic plummeted, and many nations long restricted entry or imposed daunting quarantines. Global tourism dried up. International students often went home. Some global sports events were cancelled or delayed, though an impressive number resumed fairly quickly – like the Olympic Games, which simply occurred a year late though with few foreign spectators. Many legal immigrants were sent home, particularly when unemployment increased in the first phase of the pandemic. For months, a combination of illness and strict quarantine measures reduced production in key sectors, in export powerhouses like China. The result was lower international trade and crucial shortages; car manufacturing for example in places like the United States suffered from a lack of available components. Global supply chains were seriously disrupted. And inevitably there were dire predictions that many other aspects of globalization were doomed. At the same time, key relationships continued, and globalization actually facilitated some effective response. The availability of the Internet meant that many contacts, including international conferences, could proceed without great disruption. Global connections, despite the tensions, facilitated an unprecedentedly rapid medical response. While some nations, like China and Russia, developed vaccines on their own, the most effective medicines – not only vaccines but also medicines that eased symptoms – were invented by international research and commercial collaborations. Despite nationalist reactions, scientists from many countries, including China, exchanged information about the genetic composition of the Covid-19 virus, which accelerated research on treatments. The World Health Organization facilitated clinical trials of a number of possible

A New Retreat?  219 remedies. While some vaccines were developed primarily in the United States, collaborations among European researchers and commercial developers, particularly a British-German combination, were also productive. The end result was the availability of several highly reliable vaccines within a year of the initial disease outbreak – an unprecedented result. Finally, though there was some national hoarding of medications, several nations ultimately contributed significant supply of various vaccines to less developed nations, slowing the spread of the pandemic. At least partly as a result of research, production, and exchange, overall deaths from Covid, at least 7 million worldwide by the middle of 2023, though dreadful, fell massively short of the impact of the Spanish flu a century before, when at least 50 million had died. In turn, during 2022–3, a number of global indicators began to regain some lost ground. Even at the height of the pandemic, demand for consumer goods made in places like China had remained high, as people sought new furniture and other items to compensate for pandemic isolation. When Chinese production faltered, many global operations turned to other centers like Vietnam and Mexico. Not surprisingly, global trade levels began to recover fairly quickly. International student exchange also rebounded, with growing interest from places like India. The same applied to international tourism; by 2023, demand for new passports in the United States accelerated so quickly that the government could not keep up. Overall international flights were poised to reach up to 95 percent of their pre-pandemic levels by 2023 as well. While a full global normal was still in the future, there was no massive indication that many people had fundamentally reconsidered their international economic, cultural, or tourist connections. The result, as with so many aspects of globalization in this period of transition, was an analytical challenge. Covid did not cause the collapse of globalization that some at first predicted. It reflected weaknesses in the system; it disrupted and it roused some new suspicions; but it also confirmed the importance of international collaborations and it did not necessarily change global patterns in any durable manner. Many experts urged that more globalization, not less, was essential to promote more effective response to epidemic disease in the future. **** By 2024, any idea of a full retreat from globalization would clearly be premature. The process continued to advance on many levels. North Korea remained the only nation not heavily engaged in global networks. There was no rush to withdraw from global connections, comparable to what had happened after World War I. No major global institution had been dismantled, though a few countries pulled out of the International Criminal Court (and many major nations had refused to join in the first place). But, again, most global institutions remained intact. Still, the emergence of new constraints on globalization – both from authoritarian regimes and from political movements in the West – did raise new questions.

220  Contemporary Globalization The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 created and reflected global uncertainties as well. The brutal attack prompted vigorous resistance from the West, in support of Ukraine. It brought new disruptions of global trade, in grains, fertilizers, and petroleum. However, Western efforts to mobilize world opinion faltered badly. Major nations like China, India, and Brazil, and much of Africa, held back, viewing the problem as a regional matter and eager to demonstrate their independence from Western dictates. Globalization, or at least the American-­led context for globalization, was losing ground as a framework for limiting military conflict. Revealingly, remaining arms control agreements between the United States and Russia also collapsed. Many observers worried about the implications of this new and complex transition period in globalization for the avoidance of major war. For globalization in general, questions easily surpassed clear answers. Would global trade actually begin to retreat? Or was the real question not globalization itself, but disputes over the lingering dominance of the West and the United States – such that the process might proceed under new kinds of leadership and with some changes in emphasis? Would the Covid experience create durable new approaches to globalization or would it quickly be forgotten – as the “Spanish” flu had been after 1919? Would the continued growth of international social media, joined to the new implications of Artificial Intelligence, accelerate or disrupt global cultural contacts? The most recent phase of globalization, which had seemed to be advancing smoothly when the new century began, now embraces a growing set of issues and challenges, even as many features of the contemporary framework remain intact. Further Readings Stephen King, Grave New World: The End of Globalization and the Return of History (New Haven, CT, 2017); Diego Olstein, A Brief History of Now: The Past and Present of Global Power (London, 2021). Carlos de la Torre, Populisms: A Quick Immersion (New York, 2019); Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman, Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites and Regime Change (Princeton, NJ, 2016); Steven Levinsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York, 2018). Richard T. Griffiths, Revitalising the Silk Road: China’s Belt and Road Initiative (Leiden, 2017); Bruno Macaes, Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order (New York, 2019); Mingfu Liu, The China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era (Beijing, 2015). P. Antras, Stephen Reddy, and Estoban Rossi-Hansberg, “Globalization and Pandemics,” American Economic Review 113 (2023). Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis (New York, 2017).

11 Conclusion The Historical Perspective

Globalization has a complex history. It does not sail smoothly from some earlier point in time, like 1000 CE, though there are connections among the different phases of trans-regional contact over the past millennium. However, it also did not emerge brand new from the heads of policy innovators and communications inventors 50 years ago. There are good cases to be made for several key junctures in the history of globalization (or protoglobalization or archaic globalization – the various terms show how hard it is to pinpoint a single date of origin). Ultimately, it’s the complexity that emerges as the key finding – the existence of several stages in what became contemporary globalization – not a need to make an all-or-nothing selection of one particular phase. It is useful to subject the claim of early origin for globalization to critical analysis, but to apply the same kind of analysis to any argument that globalization is a purely recent phenomenon. Historical perspectives also invite scrutiny of inevitability arguments. Was there any point at which interregional contacts became so intense – even with far different technologies from those available today – that later amplifications followed naturally without much need for additional causation? Even recent “inevitabilities” need to be questioned: after all, it was just a quarter-century ago that many intelligent people predicted smooth sailing for a global framework for the foreseeable future. Globalization requires attention to the variety of factors, including explicit policy decisions, that have prompted new kinds of interregional connections. It also highlights points of disruption or regional resistance, where again the causes of change require attention. The same kind of analysis remains vital today, as we try to figure out how, but also why, global contacts are likely to change in the future. As part of its complexity, the history of globalization may invite a more nuanced view of the whole process than some globalization theories have emphasized, particularly as globalization is understood as a set of connections including but going beyond world trade. Earlier chapters have suggested the possibility of breaking globalization into constituent parts before recombining the whole, and historical analysis facilitates this approach. Certain aspects of globalization go DOI: 10.4324/9781003439615-16

222  Contemporary Globalization way back in time, and while they did not have contemporary shape at first, there are certainly some connections between then and now. Migration and disease transmissions are the most obvious aspects that begin to set a trans-regional stage early on. Extensive and regular trade also go well back in world history, though major adjustments in business organization were required at later stages. Political and cultural globalizations, although again they offer some earlier hints, seem to begin more decisively in the later 19th century. And full environmental globalization is a more recent product still. One of the telling features of contemporary globalization is its multifaceted quality, its blending of trade with culture, innovative politics with old-new patterns of disease transmission. Historical perspective is central to understanding these combinations and how they depart from, yet build on, the past. Regional balance, or imbalance, has been a critical aspect of globalization in every phase, and this also remains true today. Thus, intellectuals in contemporary China divide over whether globalization is a benefit or a curse, with some claiming that China can find greater world voice as well as prosperity through participating in globalization; but others damning the process as a Western-­ capitalist plot that will force China into a foreign mold – and this in a country that, many observers might argue, has particularly profited from new global contacts over the past two decades. As we have seen, Western voices now add another angle to the globalization debate, as the process can now be seen as a reduction, rather than enhancement, of the Western role in the world. Many Islamic countries host debates between those who see Islam, long a global force, as benefiting from international contacts, and those who, like the current leaders of Afghanistan, seek to retreat. The further issue of regional preponderance is particularly sticky, since it may be central to some of the uncertainties about the process today. Each previous phase of globalization has featured initiatives from a major region: for early globalization, the Arabs played a disproportionate role; for protoglobalization, Western Europe; for modern, Anglo-Europe; and for contemporary, the United States. At each stage, other societies were actively involved – it was never a oneregion show. But there was some regional direction. By the early 21st century, the United States role was coming under some question, though it remained important. Would another sponsoring region emerge, and with what results? Or would/could globalization truly become more multi-polar? History, in this case, sets up a key question but does not provide an answer. Historical analysis also does not resolve what might be an even more basic issue: whether globalization has, overall, had good or bad effects on the world at large. The historical perspective certainly shows why there are so many arguments, among scholars, activists, and ordinary people alike, about the pros and cons of globalization. Problems with protoglobalization surfaced early, particularly in terms of regional economic inequalities and undue dominance by certain societies. All phases of globalization have left some groups feeling they

Conclusion  223 were losing control or were being challenged if they hoped to retain cherished cultural identities. Many of these problems have continued to dog the process, often accelerating as globalization itself becomes more intense, creating great sensitivity to the economic drawbacks for many groups and encouraging the perception that globalization is simply a fancy name for Western or American economic and cultural imperialism. Globalization has advanced anyway, yet sometimes amid interruptions and ongoing regional disagreements, but the hostilities remain important as well. One of the intriguing aspects of the contemporary era is the effort, still tentative, to figure out how best to express concerns directly about the process itself, how to give voice to people otherwise ignored except by conscientious pollsters. This aspect of globalization history is still being written. Differential responses to the various facets of globalization add to the difficulties of evaluation. International polls taken around 2010 suggested that cultural globalization was the aspect most widely disliked, with a 72 percent hostility rating: people worried about threats to basic values. Economic globalization was seen as beneficial by about 50 percent of the respondents, particularly in the developing world where, rightly or wrongly, it was associated with new opportunities. Women were slightly more favorable to globalization than men, which made some sense given global support for women’s rights. In some regions, young people were more enthused than their elders, though that was not always the case. At every stage, definitely including its most recent iterations, globalization has benefited some people, and often some regions, while harming others. Different balance sheets apply depending on the time period: right now, regional inequalities seem less pressing than in the past, but concerns about poverty within key societies – a poverty that globalization may exacerbate and certainly does not seem to resolve – grow more intense. Environmental globalization and inadequate global response have increased on the problems’ list. With the pandemic, concerns about future health threats surge forward as well. Have issues of cultural identity receded a bit, as more groups and regions figure out how to balance new opportunities with a preservation of local flavor? Is globalization, as some critics argue, simply a framework in which the powerful increase their power, or have wider segments of the world’s population figured out how to participate to their advantage? The modern tension between globalization and nationalism has not been fully resolved, another issue that can be traced historically at least during the two most recent development periods for globalization. A number of scholars have pointed out that the persistence of nationalism in some ways makes no sense, given the complexity of economic interdependence and the rise of multinational organizations. But nationalism seems to serve a purpose still, particularly in firming up a sense of identity, and a smooth relationship with global values and institutions has yet to be worked out.

224  Contemporary Globalization Globalization, despite all the debate about it, is not an abstraction. As it has unfolded in key phases, it has affected what people in many regions ate, what they valued in life, what kind of education they sought, what diseases they might contract, and of course what kinds of goods they bought. It has stimulated a sense of adventure and the excitement of encountering different cultures, and it has created a sense that risks were too great and that one’s own ways of thinking about things must be protected from outside contagion. It has defined key political issues for leaders and voters alike, even when domestic issues seem easier to grapple with. The daily meanings of globalization are more important now than ever before, but they are not brand new. The emergence of globalization over time is a story of changes people have encountered in many aspects of life, generating new stimulus and new anxiety alike. This mixture, too, continues to unfold. One final issue emerged at least with contemporary globalization levels: has the world reached a point where more globalization has become essential, particularly in the political realm? Economic globalization has arguably outstripped desirable institutional controls, leading still to excessive exploitation of some commodities-producing regions and to dangerous levels of environmental pollution. Global agreements have successfully addressed some problems, like the threats to the ozone layer, but basic deteriorations continue despite promising international conferences. Issues of weapons control and epidemic disease may also call for new global approaches. Current quarrels over globalization and issues of global leadership make it impossible to predict if further innovation is likely, even assuming that it might be desirable. Nevertheless, historical perspectives on globalization may facilitate discussion of areas where additional global coordination may be required, and even how it might be generated.

Index

abolitionism 108 Account of China and India, The 56 accumulations 205–206 acid rain 201 acupuncture 196–197 Afghanistan: decorative materials 11, 15 Africa 7, 8, 10, 12, 15, 33, 34, 92, 93, 136, 177, 180, 196–198, 204, 205, 210–212, 217, 218, 220; AIDS 194; Arab activities 38; democracy 192; dissemination of paper 51; environment 134; food products 11, 52, 84–86; globalization 94–95; gold 58; hunting 87; imperialism 122, 146, 147; inequality 90, 180; international trading companies 87, 89; mapping 36; mathematics 54; migration 10, 82, 83, 126, 182, 184; protoglobalization 94–96; religion 29, 57; shipping 80; slave trade 79; steamships 119; technology 75, 78, 99, 120; textiles 53; tourism and travel 129; trade 17, 19–21, 24, 28, 37, 39–42, 66, 67, 82, 124, 146; trade routes 40, 46–49; trans-regional contacts 58–59, 62, 74; tropical diseases 140; yellow fever 131 agriculture 10–12, 14–16, 18, 23, 54, 85, 100, 124, 126, 127, 129, 134, 173, 178, 180, 181, 190, 201, 220 Ahmed ibn Majid 44 AIDS 194, 200 airplanes 169 Alaska: migration 10, 16 Alexander the Great 23, 27

alfalfa 23 al-Faraghani 43 Algeria 144, 182 Ali, M. 132 al-Idrisi 51 Al-Khwarizmi 53–54 American Express Company 128 Americanization 118, 145, 167 American Revolution 106, 108 Americas 10, 34, 35, 54, 59, 61, 70, 73, 74, 75, 79–86, 90, 92, 95–97, 100, 103–106, 108, 114, 120, 126 Amnesty International 187, 214, 215 Antarctic 77, 120, 136, 201 apartheid 191 Arabic 37–39, 43, 51, 54, 175, 176 Arab(s) 7, 22, 23, 43–45, 47, 50, 51, 62, 64, 65, 67, 75–77, 87, 95, 129; caliphate 22, 38, 40, 46, 55, 65, 67; coins 48; commerce 42; commercial law 41; expansion 52; kamal 43, 77; maps 36; mathematics 55; medicine 56; numbering systems 54; regional patterns 59, 60; shipping 37, 45, 46, 59; trade 18, 34, 38, 175; as trans-regional leaders 38–42 Arab Spring 214 “archaic” globalization 33–35, 59, 69, 103, 221 art 79, 91, 100, 126, 141, 145, 155, 205 Asia: central see central Asia; protoglobalization 94–96; spices 89, 90; trade 17 astrolabe 43, 77

226 Index Australia: Chinese expeditions 95; communication 169–171; foods 130; geography 104; isolation 73; movies 145; Netflix 209; sports 143; telegraph 120; tourism 183, 198; trade 10, 80, 123, 124, 179; transportation 169–171; youth culture 200 authoritarianism 213–215 Azores 19 Aztecs 75, 76 Bahrain 17 bananas 11 banks 124, 125, 146, 173, 175, 181, 203, 204, 212 Bantu 10 Barbie dolls 197 baseball 144, 149 Battuta, Ibn 36, 56–58, 198 Bayly, C.A. 75, 103–105 beauty contests 197, 199 Belitung shipwreck 37 Bennison, A. 40 Bermuda 10 bills of exchange 41 birthdays 198 Black Death 60 blue jeans 198, 200 Bollywood 198 Book of the Wonders of India 56 boycotts 188 Brazil 3, 167, 170, 181, 195, 220; environment-friendly publicity campaigns 189; football 144; humanitarianism 139; industrial economics 212; Netflix 209; plantation 90, 134, 201; yellow fever 131 Britain see United Kingdom British Empire 123 bronze 11 Buddhism 29, 30, 60; centers 38; spread of 49, 53 Buddhist wisdom 12 Burundi 176 Byzantine Empire 41, 42, 46, 47, 55, 57, 62, 66 caliphate 20; Arab 22, 38, 40, 46, 55, 65, 67 camels 17, 25, 57

Canada 79, 170; fast food restaurants 197; immigration 213, 217; metric system 136; Pacific Partnership 212; SARS 193, 194; trains 119 Canaries 19, 62, 79 capitalism 105, 138, 140, 172 caravelles 45 Carnegie, A. 140 cell phones 165, 166, 170 Central Asia: horses 11 central Asia 11, 12, 36, 48, 53, 65, 75, 184, 211; communism 183; highways 23; Mongols 64; nomadic traders 23; religion 57; tea 52, 106; trade 24, 38, 50, 95; travel 27, 28; see also Asia Chaucer 43 child(ren): labor 156, 191; rights 192; soldiers 190, 191 Chile 178 chili peppers 84–86 China 3, 7, 8, 167, 186, 192, 202, 204, 208–212, 214, 222; Buddhism 12, 60; Chinese Empire 21, 23, 24, 38; Chinese restaurants 131; communication 169–171; consumerism 15, 106; Covid-19 pandemic 217–219; cuisine 85; cultural globalization 195, 196, 199; cultural imitation 53–55; environmental changes 86; epidemics 131; foods 85, 86; globalization 60–62, 71, 81, 95–98, 100; Han dynasty 20, 23, 29, 43, 46, 52; horses 11; humanitarianism 139, 140; imperialism 122; industrialization 108; inequality 93, 94, 178–181; language 176, 177; Marco Polo 36, 56, 58, 64, 66; Middle Kingdom 11; migration 12, 184; Mongol invasion 62, 64–67, 70; movies 145; nationalism 216, 217; Opium War of 1839 122; policy change 172–174; regional knowledge 56–59; regional patterns 59, 60, 148–150; religion 29; SARS 193, 194; Silk Road 15, 16, 23–26, 29, 31, 33, 35, 48, 65, 85, 103, 105, 210, 211; Song

Index  227 dynasty 37, 42, 44, 46; Talas River battle 50; tastes 50–53; technology 42–44, 46, 75, 92, 119, 121, 133; trade 12, 15, 16, 21, 36–42, 124, 178–181; trade routes 46, 48, 49; transportation 169–171; travel and tourism 129; travellers 56–59; youth culture 200 cholera 83, 84, 131–133 Christianity 29–31, 38, 53, 55, 97, 107, 196 Christmas 198 cinnamon 18, 20 Cirebon shipwreck 37 cities 12, 19, 20, 25, 41, 44, 47–49, 57, 65–67, 86, 88, 91, 92, 94, 95, 100, 107, 123, 128, 131, 132, 134, 142, 145, 149, 166, 176, 179, 194, 197, 198, 205 Civil War (US) 124 Clarke, A. 170 clash of civilization 20 classical period 20–26 Clean Clothes Campaign 188 clipper ships 119 clocks 77, 82, 98, 108, 142, 148 Club Med/Club Méditerranée 183 coconuts 11 coffee 5, 86, 101, 106, 120, 146, 201 Cold War 1, 167, 168, 170, 172, 180, 183, 185, 187, 193, 215; ambivalent role of 177–178 colonialism 4, 82; economic 211; neocolonialism 192 Columbian exchange 82, 83, 131, 146 Columbus, C. 36, 56, 58, 66, 77, 79, 80, 84 comics 198 communication 169–171, 175–177 communism 183 compass 43–45, 51, 77 computers 170, 171, 175, 195, 217 Constantinople 47 consumerism 105–106; beauty contests 197, 199; blue jeans 198, 200; mass 14; motion pictures 144 contact 9–13 Convention on International Aviation 169 convergence 33, 35, 38, 49, 57, 70

Cook, J. 77–78 Cook, T. 128 Co-Prosperity Sphere 155 corn 84–86, 146 cotton 25, 37, 41, 53, 66, 81, 89, 90, 94, 95, 108–110, 134, 146 Covid-19 pandemic 3, 217–220 crusades 44, 52, 107, 139 Crystal Palace 123 cultural globalization 141–142, 195–200 cultural identity 150, 209, 216, 217, 223 cultural imitations 53–56 cultural issues 97–100 Cunard Line 119 Cyrillic 55 Cyrus 22 dar al-Islam 40, 57 dar al-sulh 40 decolonization 167, 168, 204 de Coubertin, P. 143 de Lesseps, F. 121 democracy 128, 167, 191–193, 208, 213, 214 department stores 142, 145, 149 depression 125, 155, 156, 158, 168, 173, 191, 211, 215, 218 dhows 45 Dilmun (Bahrain) 17, 18 disease 59, 60, 73, 84, 85, 92, 100, 122, 131–133, 159, 196, 217, 218; contagious 131, 151, 157; control 132, 172, 195; epidemic 6, 26, 132, 153, 193, 219, 224; exchange 9; and migration 82–84; outbreak 219; transmission 157, 194, 205, 222 Disney Park 197, 198 dominance 90–92 donkeys 17, 57 Drumont, H. 137 Dutch East India Company 88 economic colonialism 211 economic inequality 94, 96, 120, 148, 179, 203, 216, 222 Egypt: mathematics 12; spices 18, 27 Eisenhower, D. 191 elephants 20, 22, 26, 40, 87

228 Index empires 35, 129; British Empire 123; Byzantine Empire 41, 42, 46, 47, 55, 57, 62, 66; Chinese Empire 21, 23, 24, 38; Ghana 47; Habsburg 147; Islamic 74; Mali 58, 87; Mongol Empire 34, 64, 107; Mughal 94; Ottoman Empire 83, 98, 104, 106, 110, 124, 139, 147; Persian Empire 22, 23; Roman Empire 21–27, 29, 49; Western 148 England see United Kingdom English 1, 43, 44, 49, 52, 58, 71, 82, 85, 128, 133, 144, 153, 168, 175–177, 185, 188, 189, 200 Enlightenment 107 environment 3, 4, 9, 86–87, 132, 134, 171, 185, 186, 188–191, 193, 194, 198, 201–202, 205, 208, 209, 223, 224 environmental changes 86–87 epidemics 131–133 Ethiopia 17, 29, 58 Europe: industrious revolution 14; manufacturing capacity, expansion of 108–110; migration 12; outlook on the world 92–93; trade 17 European Union 176, 192, 213, 217 exchange 49–50 Fadlan, Ibn 48 fashion 24, 53, 90, 98, 100, 109, 142, 145, 158, 176 Federal Express 170 feminism 138 Fibonacci, L. 54, 55 First International 138 Flying Tiger 169–170 foods 84–86, 130–131; bananas 11; coconuts 11; corn 84–86, 146; kiwis 179; pepper 25, 52, 82, 84–86; pizza 131; potato 84, 85, 93, 131, 146; tomato 84, 131, 146; yams 11 football 144, 149, 205 France: cuisine 131; language 79, 175, 176; Olympics 143; Revolution 108, 147; Seven Years War 82, 94, 103; Suez Canal 120 Frank, A. G. 14 freer trade 121–123

Friedman, T. 163; The World Is Flat 167 Friends of the Earth 188 Fukuzawa Yukichi 141 galleon 76 genocide 159, 190, 192 Gerbert of Aurillas 54 Germany 120, 123, 124, 129, 130, 147, 155, 158, 168, 174, 178, 184, 202, 216 Ghana 47; empire 47 Gilgamesh 18 global inequality 74, 89–92, 105, 171 global political institutions, emergence of 134–135 global warming 188, 201, 202 gold 11, 17, 25, 26, 28, 41, 47, 58, 65, 82, 95, 121, 172 Greece 19, 21, 22, 43, 143, 211, 212 Greenpeace 188 Group of 20 191, 203, 204, 212 Guam 80 guest workers 182 guns 66, 67, 71, 76, 78, 82, 90, 97–99, 101, 108, 124 Habsburg empire 147 Han dynasty 20, 23, 29, 43, 46, 52 Hanno 12 Harappa 17 Harbin 145 Hawaii 10, 80, 104, 126, 183 health, global 193–195 Hello Kitty 5 highways 23 historical analysis of globalization 3–13 Hollywood 144, 145, 155, 199, 214 Homo sapiens sapiens 9–11 Hopkins, A.G. 33, 69 horses 11, 23, 24, 47, 65, 84 hotels 183, 184, 198 humanitarianism 110; global 138–140 human rights 4, 108, 156, 171, 172, 177, 185, 187, 188, 190, 192, 204, 206, 208, 214–216 Human Rights Watch 188 Hungary 17, 65, 127, 213 hunting and gathering 9, 10, 73 Hurricane Katrina 5, 190 identity 10, 19, 55, 73, 97, 101, 122, 140, 147, 148, 153, 185, 193, 199, 200;

Index  229 civilizational 21; cultural 150, 209, 216, 217, 223; loss of 9, 56, 198, 203; national 141; regional 31, 86, 150; Western 100 IMF see International Monetary Fund (IMF) imitation 7, 27, 50, 55, 56, 61, 62, 96–100, 133, 136, 141, 150 imperialism 108, 113–115, 121–123; British 146; Western 126, 146, 147, 154, 223 indenture 127, 146 India 3, 11, 33, 36–42, 62, 66, 67, 71, 92, 94–96, 103, 105, 146, 154, 167, 170, 176, 179–181, 192, 195–199, 200, 202, 208, 209, 215; Bollywood 198; Buddhist wisdom 12; civilizations 16; consumerism 14, 15; Covid-19 pandemic 218, 219; cultural imitations 53; culture 97, 98; environment 134; epidemics 131, 132; foods 85, 86; imperialism 122; industrialization 108–110; inequality 90; migration 12, 83, 126, 182–184; movies 145; nationalism 147; regional knowledge 56–58; regional patterns 60, 204; religion 29, 30; spices 85; tastes 50–53; technology 42, 45, 46, 75–78, 120, 121; trade 14–29, 81, 82; trade routes 19, 46, 47; travel and tourism 129, 130; travellers 56–58 Indian Ocean 15–20, 22, 23, 26, 29, 37, 39, 42, 60, 62, 67, 71, 80, 85, 146; commerce 41, 75; exchanges 16, 25, 49; shipping 33, 45, 46, 77, 78; trade routes 24, 25, 38, 40, 52, 87, 94, 95; tsunami 190 Indo-Europeans 10 Indo-European Telegraph Company 120 Indonesia 67, 88, 89, 184, 186; democracy 192; environmental pollution 189, 202; fashion 53; plantation 92; shipping 37, 58; steel production 51; sugar 52; trade routes 15, 17, 24, 25, 39, 40, 44 industrialization 108–110 industrious revolution 14 inequality 73, 110, 178–181; economic 94, 96, 120, 148, 179, 203, 216,

222; global 74, 89–92, 105, 171; racial 191; regional 70, 90, 93–94, 146, 147, 180, 223; regional, limits on 93–94; social 81 influenza 84, 131 INGOs. See International NonGovernmental Organizations (INGOs) innovations 205–206 Intelsat 170 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development 173 international business 123–126 international companies 88, 104, 110, 124, 125, 140, 146, 155, 186, 214 International Labor Office 156, 165 International Meteorological Association 136 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 172–173, 180, 204 International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) 138, 139, 171, 185–189, 202, 215 international trading companies 87–89 Internet 6, 166, 167, 170, 171, 185, 187, 196, 197, 204, 209, 210, 214, 218 Iran 95, 139, 156, 214 Iraq: Mesopotamia 14 ISIS 4 Islam 29–31, 38–40, 45, 47, 48, 51, 57, 60, 61, 67, 70, 74, 97, 144, 175, 210, 222 Islamic empire 74 isolation 9–13 isolationism 154, 159, 168, 174 Italy: commerce 21; education 155; migration 127, 212; nationalism 147; Netflix 209; numbering system 54; plaque 60; populism 216; trade routes 44, 123 ivory 17 Jacques, M. 4 Japan 8, 14, 37, 38, 61, 62, 64–67, 96, 133, 137, 141, 142, 153, 155, 167, 168, 186, 187, 190–192, 195–198, 202–205, 209, 211, 212, 215; communication 170, 171; cultural imitations 54–56; cultural issues 98, 99; imperialism 123; inequality 178–180; language 176; migration 126, 133, 182–184;

230 Index movies 145; nationalism 148; Olympics 170; policy change 173, 174; popular culture 145; regional inequality 93; regional patterns 148–150; regional patterns 59; sports 143, 144; tastes 50, 52, 53; technology 79, 130; toys 5; trade routes 46, 48, 49; transportation 170, 171; travel and tourism 130; youth culture 200 Jerusalem 30 jet lag 169 jets 169, 170 Jews 30, 127, 159 junks 46, 67, 76 kamal 43, 77 kinship 87, 88, 95 kiwis 179 Korea 54, 122, 176, 184; artistic movements 205; exchange 46; North 174, 219; production technologies 50; South 167, 176, 186, 200; trade routes 48–49; trans-regional contacts 59 Kyoto accords 202 land bridge (Siberia–Alaska) 10, 16 language 168–169; English lateen sail 45, 76 Latin America: trade 91 League of Nations 155, 156, 172 Lebanon 126, 129, 145 Louis XIV 157 Maasai 184 Madagascar: food products 11 Magellan, F. 76, 80 Malaysia 24, 25, 41, 87, 183, 188, 201 Maldives 57 Mali 47, 57, 58, 96; empire 58, 87 malls 198 Mandaville, J. 58 Mandela, N. 187 Mansa Musa 47 maps 29, 30, 36, 44, 74, 77, 80, 100 Marconi, G. 120 Marco Polo 36, 56, 58, 64, 66 martial arts 54 Marx, K. 138 mathematics 12, 42, 55, 98, 100 Mazlish, B. 161, 166

McDonald’s 5, 167, 189, 195, 197 Mecca 30, 39, 40, 57, 132 medicine 37, 56, 99, 132, 196, 218 Mediterranean 44–46; foods 84; language 175; migration 83, 183; regional inequality 94; regional knowledge 57, 58; religion 29, 30; tastes 51, 52; technology 120; trade 12, 15, 16, 18, 21–26, 28, 29; trade routes 46, 47, 49; travellers 57, 58 merchants 36, 45, 51, 55, 64, 71, 75, 82, 88, 89, 93, 104, 105, 122, 165; African 47, 59; American 95, 110; Arab 18, 34, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 48, 59, 87; Asian 95; British 85; Chinese 23, 25, 27, 29, 58–59, 60, 81, 93, 95, 96, 149; Dutch 49, 93, 99; Egyptian 49; English 49; European 37, 81, 84, 90, 91, 93–94; German 49; Indian 18, 41, 60, 94–96, 146; Italian 52, 54; Jewish 41; Korean 49; Middle East 56; Muslim 47; New England 106; Persian 26; Roman 25, 28, 29; Scandinavian 46; Swahili 62; trade 14, 18–22, 24, 25, 30; Western 80, 100 Mesopotamia 14, 17, 18, 20, 27, 39, 50 metric system 136 mew institutions and policies 135–138 Mexico 75, 80, 81, 97, 170, 181, 186, 194, 196, 198, 202, 203, 212, 219 Middle East 8, 10, 11, 12, 14–16, 22–28, 39–39, 41, 60, 64–67, 74, 75, 92, 95, 96, 124, 126, 157, 192, 197, 198, 212; authoritarianism 214, 215; consumerism 14, 106; decorative materials 11; epidemics 131, 132; foods 85, 86; inequality 93, 94, 179; migration 10, 12, 17, 18, 20, 83, 126, 182, 183; regional knowledge 56–58; regional patterns 149, 204, 205; religion 29; spices 17; sports 144; tastes 50–53; technology 42, 44; trade 17, 18, 20; trade routes 46, 47, 49; travellers 56–58 Middle Kingdom 11 migration 12, 16–20, 126–128, 182–185; disease and 9, 82–84 missionaries 30, 36, 38, 48, 49, 53, 54, 58, 64, 92, 97, 98, 104, 142

Index  231 Miss World 197, 198 Mongol Empire 34, 64, 107 Mongols 62, 64–67, 70 Morocco 36, 57, 137, 197 motion pictures (movies) 144 movies 144–145 Mughal empire 94 multinational corporations 5, 162, 171, 177, 185–189 Myanmar (Burma) 174 nationalism 4, 108, 135, 150, 151, 153, 155, 167, 223; European 154; liberal 148; resurgence of 215– 217; rise of 147–148; Scottish 203; Western 215–216 navigation 43–45, 50, 51, 61, 62, 71, 76–78, 96 Nazism 158, 168 Neckham, A. 44 neocolonialism 192 Nestle Company 188 Netherlands, the 80, 137, 176 new attitudes about the world 106–108 new global history 7, 69, 161–163, 165–206 New Zealand 10, 59, 73, 80, 104, 119, 126, 179, 210 Nigeria 12, 149, 179, 188 Nike 189 Northern Europe: trade 18 North Korea 174, 219 Northrup, D. 7, 33 novels 117–118 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 178 numbering system 27, 42, 53–54 nutmeg 26, 86 obesity 195, 199, 205 oil spills 201 Olympic Games 143, 155, 170, 197, 205, 218 opinion polls 213 opium 110, 122 Opium War of 1839 122 Orban, V. 4 Organization of African Unity 190 Ottoman Empire 83, 98, 104, 106, 110, 124, 139, 147 ozone layers 188, 201, 202, 224

Pacific Oceania 18, 35, 59, 61, 70, 79–81, 79–82, 97, 104 Pakistan 24, 41, 182, 198; consumerism 14; trade 17 Panama 80, 117, 121 Panama Canal 121, 132 paper 27, 50, 51, 61, 133 parents 197 Paris Convention on Industrial Property 135–136 Parthian Empire 23 passports 157, 158, 185, 219 pepper 25, 52, 82, 84–86 Persia 58, 64, 65, 89, 95; civilization 15, 20; exchange 22, 26, 28, 51; fashion 53; numbering system 53; paper 50; shipping 17, 46; silk 23, 24, 42; sugar 52; tea 52; telegraph 120; trade 17 Persian Empire 22, 23 Persian Gulf 17, 18, 37, 39, 41, 56, 139 Peru 127 Peter the Great 99 Philippines: Chinese merchants 93, 95; Christian conversion 71; democracy 192; exchange 80; Islam 97; migration 126, 182; potato 85; Spanish influence 98, 105; trade 80, 81 Phoenicia 12, 19, 22 pig 11 pilgrimages 39, 40, 57 pirates 18, 25, 82 pizza 131 Pokémon 5 Poland 17, 65, 92 policy change 172–175 politics, global 189–193 Polynesia 18 popular culture 144–145 porcelain 37, 41, 42, 45, 48, 52, 71, 81, 93, 95, 100 Portugal 62, 74, 75, 78, 90, 91 postal system 23 post-colonial 4 potato 84, 85, 93, 131, 146 printing 66, 78, 79, 97, 99, 109 protest, global 202–203 protoglobalization 69–71 public health 132, 140, 193, 195 public opinion 106, 107, 134, 138, 172, 187, 189, 192

232 Index quadrants 43, 77 Quakersism 107, 187 Quanzhou 37, 41 racial inequality 191 racism 3, 92, 93, 108, 158; scientific 148; White 148, 217 radicalism 4 radio 120, 125, 158, 196 railroads 119, 124, 126, 131, 133 Ramadan 144, 197, 198 rape 188 Red Sea 17, 25, 38, 40, 44, 120 Red Sea Sanitary Service 132 refrigeration 119, 130 regional identity 31, 86, 150 regional inequality 70, 90, 93–94, 146, 147, 180, 223 regional knowledge, expanded 56–59 regional patterns 59–60, 148–150, 203–205 religion 10, 27, 38, 39, 54, 57, 74, 87, 93, 95, 107, 108, 141, 196; missionary 29–31, 33, 53, 60, 114; politics and 40 resorts 129, 183 Reuters 120 rhinoceros 25 Rig Veda 18 roads 10, 20, 23, 153, 210 Robertson, R. 69; The Three Waves of Globalization 7 Rockefeller, J. D. 140 Rockefeller Foundation 140, 181 Roman Empire 21–27, 29, 49 Rome: civilizations 16 Royal Observatory 77 rudder 24, 45, 46 Rushd, Ibn 55 Russia 12, 38, 62, 64–67, 74, 92, 95, 99, 100, 124, 125, 137, 142, 145, 155, 158, 159, 192, 202, 205, 208, 210, 220; authoritarianism 214, 215; Covid-19 pandemic 218; cultural imitations 55, 56; environmental change 86; epidemics 132; foods 131; humanitarianism 139; industrialization 108, 110; inequality 179; language 176; migration 83, 183; policy change 174; regional knowledge

57; regional patterns 59, 149; technology 79, 119, 120, 133; trade routes 46, 48; travellers 57 Rwanda 192 Sahara 19, 47, 57, 59, 191 SARS see Severe Autoimmune Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) satellites 167, 170 Saudi Arabia 190, 202, 214 Scandinavia 34, 46–48, 201, 213 Schaefer, W. 69, 161 science 79, 99, 141, 148, 150, 196, 197, 204; European 99; globalization 175; medicine 37, 56, 99, 132, 196, 218; social 150; students 55; training opportunities 184 scientific racism 148 Seneca 28 Seven Years War 82, 94, 103 Severe Autoimmune Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) 193, 194 sex trade 139, 182 Shanghai 142, 149, 195 ships 17, 18, 20, 24, 25, 33, 36, 37, 41–43, 45, 46, 58, 59, 62, 70, 71, 75–78, 80, 82, 87–91, 93, 94, 96, 100, 114, 118, 119, 121, 123–125, 127, 130, 132, 135, 136, 146, 166 Siberia: migration 10, 16 Sicily 50, 52 Sierra Leone 12 silk 23–25, 28, 33, 35, 36, 41, 42, 44, 53, 59, 81, 89, 93, 100, 108, 109, 126 Silk Road 15, 16, 23–26, 29, 31, 33, 35, 48, 65, 85, 103, 105, 210, 211 silver 37, 41, 80–82, 89, 90, 93–96, 101, 106 Singapore 171, 192, 194, 196, 200 Singer Sewing Machine Company 125 slaves: African 37, 41, 62, 79, 80, 82, 83, 91–93, 96, 97, 124, 130; Caribbean 87, 104; Dutch 88; Ethiopia 17; inter-regional trade 89; Malaysia 87; sex 182; trade, Atlantic 105, 107 slaves 47, 48 social inequality 81 Song dynasty 37, 42, 44, 46 South Africa 89, 103, 145, 146, 169, 187, 191, 196

Index  233 Southeast Asia 5, 10, 18, 24, 25, 29, 34, 36–39, 65, 67, 80, 88, 90, 95, 96, 196, 210, 211; cultural imitations 56; cultural issues 97; food products 11; inequality 93, 179–181; migration 126, 182, 183; pig 11; politics 193; regional knowledge 58; regional patterns 60; spices 88; taste 52; technology 42–44, 76, 78; trade 17, 81; travellers 58 South Korea 167, 176, 186, 200 Soviet Union 154–156, 168, 172, 177, 178, 197, 202 Spain 31, 38, 90, 91, 201, 209; cultural imitations 54, 55, 62, 74; migration 183; tastes 50–52; technology 43, 75, 121; trade 82 spices 20, 33, 37, 41, 48, 85, 92, 94, 113, 119; Asian 89, 90; cinnamon 18, 20; Egypt 18, 27; Indian Ocean 25; Middle East 17; nutmeg 26, 86; Southeast Asia 88 sports 6, 7, 114, 142–144, 147, 151, 155, 166, 170, 185, 197, 205, 216, 218 Sputnik 170 Sri Lanka 24, 25, 40, 41, 57 Stalin, J. 154 Stalinism 168 Starbucks 5 steam engine 109, 118, 119, 133 steamships 117–119, 133, 141 steel 51, 119, 140 study abroad 142, 155, 184, 185, 200 subordination 90–92 sub-Saharan Africa: trade 18 Sudoku 197 Suez Canal 120 sugar 37, 42, 52–53, 59, 62, 63, 70, 82, 90, 100, 106, 108 Sun Yat-sen 130 Swahili 38, 39, 41, 47, 62, 71, 96, 200 Switzerland 109, 128, 135, 144, 162 Syria 17, 42, 44, 210 Tahiti 183 Taiwan 89, 136, 196, 215 Talas River 50 tariffs 121, 156, 159, 173, 191, 208, 217 tastes 50–53

taxes 19–21, 26, 41, 47, 75, 81, 91, 106, 125 tea 37, 42, 52, 53, 81, 86, 101, 106, 134 technology 75–79, 168–169; exchange 64, 133; new 42–46, 118–121; spreading 133 telegraph 114, 118, 120, 135, 155 telephone 120, 170, 171, 176 terrorism 174, 185, 210, 213 Thousand and One Nights, A 40 Timbuktu 47 tin 11 tomato 84, 131, 146 topless bathing 184 torture 187, 188 tourism 22, 119, 128–130, 151, 174, 176, 183, 184, 196, 198, 209, 218, 219 trade routes 46–49 trading companies 6, 79, 87–89, 100, 104, 105, 122, 124, 186 trains 119 transportation 169–171 travel 11, 12, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 27, 29, 30, 33, 36, 40, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 53, 56–59, 61, 62, 64, 67, 78, 97, 98, 118, 119, 121, 128–130, 143, 153, 157, 158, 165, 169, 174, 176, 182–186, 194, 198, 213, 218 travelers 56–59 Triple Expansion Engines 119 Trump, D. 4 tsunami 5, 190 tulips 106 Turkey 137, 140, 147, 155, 156, 183, 186, 198, 209, 212, 214, 217 United Arab Emirates 176, 182, 198, 199 United Fruit Company 124 United Kingdom 74, 103, 104, 118, 154, 157; consumerism 106; decorative materials 11; dominance 90, 91; environmental changes 86; globalization 212, 213; imperialism 121, 146; inequalities 178; international trading companies in 88; language 176; migration 185; movies 145; nationalism 216, 217; new routes 46; new technologies and systems 118, 120, 133; policy change 172; popular culture 145; regional inequality 94;

234 Index regional patterns 150; sports 143; subordination 90, 91; sugar 52; tourism 128–130; trade 11, 82, 121, 123, 178; travel 128–130; youth culture 200 United Nations 135, 136, 156, 169, 172, 175, 177, 187, 189, 190, 192, 199, 204 United States 104, 113, 115, 118, 135, 136, 141, 143, 144, 153–155, 157, 159, 165, 177, 179–181, 189, 190, 195–198, 202, 208–213, 220, 222; acupuncture 196–197; antiSemitism 127; authoritarianism 215; Barbie dolls 197; beauty contests 197, 199; Chinese restaurants 131; Civil War 124; communication 169–171; Covid-19 pandemic 218, 219; epidemics 131; foods 130, 131; gold 121; humanitarianism 139; Hurricane Katrina 5, 190; imperialism 121, 122; industrialization 110; language 168, 175, 176; migration 10, 16, 126, 127, 182, 186; motion pictures (movies) 144; movies 145; nationalism 148, 216, 217; obesity 195, 199, 205; policy change 172, 174; politics 190, 191; popular culture 145; regional patterns 149, 150, 204, 205; Supreme Court 190; technology 119–121; tourism 128, 129; trade 123–126; transportation 169–171; travel 128, 129; youth culture 200 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 172 Universal Postal Union 135 Van Gogh, V. 141 Vasco da Gama 75

veiling 139, 140, 149, 150 Vietnam 24–26, 50, 189, 200, 211, 212, 214, 219 virgin soil epidemics 83 von Stephan, H. 135 Wallerstein, I. 90 Wang Li 60 Western empire 148 Western imperialism 126, 146, 147, 154, 223 Westernization 79, 99, 150, 167 White racism 148, 217 wines 21, 25, 130 women’s rights 156, 167, 223 World Bank 173, 175, 203 World Cup 5, 144, 170, 197 World Health Organization 193–195, 204, 217, 218 world opinion 138–140 World Purity Federation 139 world’s fairs 118, 123, 126, 133 World Trade Organization 173, 203 World War I 8, 114, 115, 117, 126, 128, 137, 138, 143, 144, 147, 148, 150, 154–158, 168, 208, 211, 215, 219 World War II 115, 129, 144, 153, 154, 158, 159, 168, 169, 170, 172, 175, 193, 204, 212, 216 writing 26, 27, 47, 48, 50, 53–55, 120, 187 Yamato clan 54 yams 11 Yanai, T. 4 yellow fever 83, 131, 132, 140 Yemen 17 youth culture 200–201 Yugoslavia 174, 192 Zeiler, T. 113, 117