Comprehensive theory, key formulas, diagrams, and memory aids for The Making of a Global World.
Globalization is often associated with economic systems that have emerged in the last 50 years or so. However, the making of a global world has a long history – of trade, of migration, of people in search of work, and of the movement of capital. As we try to understand the making of the global world, we need to trace the long history of these interconnections that have shaped our societies.
Throughout history, human societies have become steadily more interlinked. Travelers, traders, priests, and pilgrims traveled vast distances for knowledge, opportunity, and spiritual fulfillment, or to escape persecution. They carried goods, money, values, skills, ideas, inventions, and even germs and diseases. As early as 3000 BCE, an active coastal trade linked the Indus Valley civilisations with present-day West Asia. For millennia, cowries (a form of currency) from the Maldives found their way to China and East Africa.
The silk routes are a good example of vibrant pre-modern trade and cultural links between distant parts of the world. The name 'silk routes' points to the importance of West-bound Chinese silk cargoes along this route. Historians have identified several silk routes, over land and by sea, knitting together vast regions of Asia, and linking Asia with Europe and northern Africa. They are known to have existed since before the Christian Era and thrived almost till the fifteenth century. Chinese pottery also traveled the same route, as did textiles and spices from India and Southeast Asia. In return, precious metals – gold and silver – flowed from Europe to Asia. Trade and cultural exchange always went hand in hand. Early Christian missionaries certainly traveled this route to Asia, as did early Muslim preachers a few centuries later. Much before all this, Buddhism emerged from eastern India and spread in several directions through intersecting points on the silk routes.
Food offers many examples of long-distance cultural exchange. Traders and travelers introduced new crops to the lands they traveled. Even 'ready' foodstuff in distant parts of the world might share common origins. It is believed that noodles traveled west from China to become spaghetti. Or, perhaps, Arab traders took pasta to fifth-century Sicily. Many of our common foods such as potatoes, soya, groundnuts, maize, tomatoes, chilies, and sweet potatoes were not known to our ancestors until about five centuries ago. These were introduced in Europe and Asia after Christopher Columbus accidentally discovered the vast continent that would later become known as the Americas. The new crops could make the difference between life and death. Europe’s poor began to eat better and live longer with the introduction of the humble potato.
The pre-modern world shrank greatly in the sixteenth century after European sailors found a sea route to Asia and also successfully crossed the western ocean to America. Before its 'discovery', America had been cut off from regular contact with the rest of the world for millions of years. But from the sixteenth century, its vast lands and abundant crops and minerals began to transform trade and lives everywhere. The Portuguese and Spanish conquest and colonization of America was decisively underway by the mid-sixteenth century. European conquest was not just a result of superior firepower. In fact, the most powerful weapon of the Spanish conquerors was not a conventional military weapon at all. It was the germs such as those of smallpox that they carried on their person. Because of their long isolation, America’s original inhabitants had no immunity against these diseases that came from Europe. Smallpox, in particular, proved a deadly killer.
The world changed profoundly in the nineteenth century. Economic, political, social, cultural, and technological factors interacted in complex ways to transform societies and reshape external relations. Economists identify three types of movement or 'flows' within international economic exchanges: 1. Flow of Trade: Primarily the trade in goods (e.g., cloth or wheat). 2. Flow of Labor: The migration of people in search of employment. 3. Flow of Capital: Investments over varying distances, both short-term and long-term.
To understand this, we can look at the pattern of food production and consumption in industrializing Europe. Traditionally, countries liked to be self-sufficient in food. But in nineteenth-century Britain, self-sufficiency in food meant lower living standards and social conflict. Population growth from the late eighteenth century had increased the demand for food grains in Britain. Under pressure from landed groups, the government also restricted the import of corn. The laws allowing the government to do this were commonly known as the 'Corn Laws'. Unhappy with high food prices, industrialists and urban dwellers forced the abolition of the Corn Laws. After the Corn Laws were scrapped, food could be imported into Britain more cheaply than it could be produced within the country. Vast areas of land in Eastern Europe, Russia, America, and Australia were cleared to expand food production to meet the British demand. It was not enough merely to clear lands for agriculture; railways were needed to link the agricultural regions to the ports.
The railways, steamships, and the telegraph were important inventions without which we cannot imagine the transformed nineteenth-century world. Colonization stimulated new investments and improvements in transport: faster railways, lighter wagons, and larger ships helped move food more cheaply and quickly from faraway farms to final markets. The trade in meat is a good example. Till the 1870s, animals were shipped live from America to Europe and then slaughtered. Live animals took up a lot of ship space and many died or fell ill in voyage. A new technology emerged, namely, refrigerated ships, which enabled the transport of perishable foods over long distances. Now animals were slaughtered at the starting point and transported to Europe as frozen meat.
Trade flourished and markets expanded in the late nineteenth century. But this was not only a period of expanding trade. In many parts of the world, the expansion of trade and a closer relationship with the world economy also meant a loss of freedoms and livelihoods. Late nineteenth-century European conquests produced many painful economic, social, and ecological changes through which the colonized societies were brought into the world economy.
In Africa, in the 1890s, a fast-spreading disease of cattle plague or rinderpest had a terrifying impact on people's livelihoods and the local economy. Historically, Africa had abundant land and a relatively small population. For centuries, land and livestock sustained African livelihoods. In the late nineteenth century, Europeans were attracted to Africa due to its vast resources of land and minerals. However, they found it difficult to recruit labor. Rinderpest arrived in Africa in the late 1880s. It was carried by infected cattle imported from British Asia to feed the Italian soldiers invading Eritrea. Entering Africa in the east, rinderpest moved west 'like forest fire', reaching Africa's Atlantic coast in 1892. It killed 90 percent of the cattle. The loss of cattle destroyed African livelihoods, forcing them into the labor market.
The example of indentured labor migration from India illustrates the two-sided nature of the nineteenth-century world. Hundreds of thousands of Indian and Chinese laborers went to work on plantations, in mines, and in road and railway construction projects around the world. In India, indentured laborers were hired under contracts which promised return travel to India after they had worked five years on their employer's plantation. Most Indian indentured workers came from the present-day regions of eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, central India, and the dry districts of Tamil Nadu. The main destinations were the Caribbean islands (mainly Trinidad, Guyana, and Surinam), Mauritius, and Fiji. Closer home, Tamil migrants went to Ceylon and Malaya. Living conditions were harsh, and they had very few legal rights.
The First World War (1914-18) was fought between the Allies (Britain, France, and Russia, later joined by the US) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Ottoman Turkey). The war caused immense economic disruption.
Post-war economic recovery proved difficult. Britain, which was the world's leading economy in the pre-war period, faced a prolonged crisis. To finance war expenditures, Britain had borrowed heavily from the US, transforming the US from an international debtor into an international creditor. The Great Depression began around 1929 and lasted till the mid-1930s. During this period, most parts of the world experienced catastrophic declines in production, employment, incomes, and trade. The depression was caused by a combination of factors, including agricultural overproduction and the withdrawal of US loans. The fallout was devastating globally, affecting farmers and industrial workers alike.
The Second World War (1939-45) caused even more devastation. Economists and politicians drew two key lessons from inter-war economic experiences: 1. An industrial society based on mass production cannot be sustained without mass consumption. 2. The goal of full employment could only be achieved if governments had power to control flows of capital, goods, and labor.
The Bretton Woods conference held in 1944 established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to deal with external surpluses and deficits and to finance post-war reconstruction. These institutions inaugurated an era of unprecedented growth of trade and incomes for the Western industrial nations and Japan. However, it also led to new forms of economic inequality, leading developing countries to organize as the G-77 to demand a New International Economic Order (NIEO).
The making of the global world is a story of long-distance connections forged by trade, migration, capital, and technology. From the early Silk Routes that facilitated cultural and economic exchange, to the devastating spread of diseases that aided colonial conquests, the world has become increasingly integrated. The 19th century witnessed an explosion in global trade and migration, transforming economies but also cementing colonial exploitation. The massive disruptions of the two World Wars prompted the creation of international institutions like the IMF and World Bank, aimed at stabilizing the global economy, setting the foundation for the interconnected world we live in today.