Making of a Global World
Globalisation Talking of 'globalisation' we often refer to an economic system that has emerged
since the last 50 years or so.But the making of the global world has a long
history — of trade, of migration, of people in search of work, the movement of
capital and much else.
Pre-modern • All through history, human societies have become steadily more interlinked.
World From ancient times, travellers, traders, priests and pilgrims travelled vast
distances for knowledge, opportunity and spiritual fulfilment, 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 more than a millennia, cowries (the Hindi cowdi or seashells, used as a
form of currency) from the Maldives found their way to China and East
Africa. The long-distance spread of disease-carrying germs may be traced
as far back as the seventh century. By the thirteenth century it had become
an unmistakable link.
Image of a ship on a memorial stone,
Goa Museum, tenth century CE.
From the ninth century, images of ships
appear regularly in memorial stones
found in the western coast, indicating the
significance of oceanic trade.
Silk Routes Link • The silk routes are a good example of vibrant pre-modern trade and
the World 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. But Chinese pottery also travelled 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 almost certainly travelled 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.
Making of a Global World
Silk route trade as depicted in a
Chinese cave painting, eighth century,
Cave 217, Mogao Grottoes, Gansu,
China.
Food Travels: • Food offers many examples of long-distance cultural exchange. Traders and
Spaghetti travellers introduced new crops to the lands they travelled. Even 'ready'
foodstuff in distant parts of the world might share common origins.
• Take spaghetti and noodles. It is believed that noodles travelled west from
China to become spaghetti. Or, perhaps Arab traders took pasta to fifth-
century Sicily, an island now in Italy.
• Similar foods were also known in India and Japan, so the truth about
their origins may never be known.
• Such guesswork suggests the possibilities of long-distance cultural contact
even in the pre-modern world.
Merchants from Venice and the
Orient exchanging goods, from
Marco Polo, Book of Marvels,
fifteenth century.
Food Travels: • Many of our common foods such as potatoes, soya, groundnuts, maize,
Potatoes tomatoes, chillies, sweet potatoes, and so on were not known to our
ancestors until about five centuries ago.
• These foods were only introduced in Europe and Asia after Christopher
Columbus accidentally discovered the vast continent that would later
become known as the Americas.
• In fact, many of our common foods came from America's original
inhabitants – the American Indians.
• Sometimes 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.
• Ireland's poorest peasants became so dependent on potatoes that when
disease destroyed the potato crop in the mid-1840s, hundreds of thousands
died of starvation.
The Irish Potato Famine, Illustrated London News, 1849.
Hungry children digging for potatoes in a field that has
already been harvested, hoping to discover some leftovers.
During the Great Irish Potato Famine (1845 to 1849), around
1,000,000 people died of starvation in Ireland, and double the
number emigrated in search of work.
Making of a Global World
Conquest, Disease • The pre-modern world shrank greatly in the sixteenth century after
and Trade European sailors found a sea route to Asia and also successfully crossed
the western ocean to America.
• For centuries before, the Indian Ocean had known a bustling trade, with
goods, people, knowledge, customs, etc. criss-crossing its waters. The Indian
subcontinent was central to these flows and a crucial point in their networks.
• The entry of the Europeans helped expand or redirect some of these flows
towards Europe.
• 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.
• Precious metals, particularly silver, from mines located in present- day Peru
and Mexico also enhanced Europe's wealth and financed its trade with Asia.
• Legends spread in seventeenth-century Europe about South America's
fabled wealth. Many expeditions set off in search of El Dorado, the fabled
city of gold.
• The Portuguese and Spanish conquest and colonisation of America was
decisively under way by the mid-sixteenth century.
• European conquest was not just a result of superior firepower.
• 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. Once introduced, it spread
deep into the continent, ahead even of any Europeans reaching there. It
killed and decimated whole communities, paving the way for conquest.
• Guns could be bought or captured and turned against the invaders. But not
diseases such as smallpox to which the conquerors were mostly immune.
• Until the nineteenth century, poverty and hunger were common in Europe.
Cities were crowded and deadly diseases were widespread. Religious conflicts
were common, and religious dissenters were persecuted.
• Thousands therefore fled Europe for America. Here, by the eighteenth
century, plantations worked by slaves captured in Africa were growing
cotton and sugar for European markets.
• Until well into the eighteenth century, China and India were among the
world's richest countries. They were also pre-eminent in Asian trade.
• However, from the fifteenth century, China is said to have restricted overseas
contacts and retreated into isolation. China's reduced role and the rising
importance of the Americas gradually moved the centre of world trade
westwards. Europe now emerged as the centre of world trade.
What is One who refuses to accept established beliefs and practices
dissenter?
