The term globalization came into use in academic circles during the 1950s. By the 1990s it had entered the mainstream vocabulary. Today it is thought of as something that is almost inseparable from the neoliberal economic and political policies that are dominating the process. People who are actively opposed to those policies speak in terms of stopping globalization. The basic purpose of this diary is to present the process of globalization in an historical context that separates it from today's realities. I plan to write other diaries on neoliberalism. This diary will be used as background for those. I wish to make it clear at the outset that I am no fan of neoliberalism. However we will see that there have been a number of points in history where a process of geographical integration has been controlled by one group of people to impose their interests on other people.
The best current genetic information seems to indicate that homo sapiens began to migrate out of Africa about 60K years ago. It appears that the actual number of individuals that left was fairly small. Over the next 20K years they spread over the Eurasian land mass and into Australia. About 13K years ago they crossed from Siberia to Alaska and spread through the Americas. The great human diaspora came to an end when the Polynesians reached New Zealand around 800CE.
For a very long period humans lived as migrant hunter gathers.
People faced the struggle to survive on a daily basis. There was no room for anyone who did make a direct contribution to survival. About 10K years ago people in various parts of the world began spontaneously to develop agricultural techniques. Rather than being totally at the mercy of what they could find in the wild they began to grow their food. This led to the establishment of more permanent settlements with fertile river valleys being the most desirable locations. One can imagine a stone age real estate developer yelling location, location, location.
As food production became more efficient individuals began to develop specialized functions within the community, farmers, herders, etc. The agricultural communities faced many threats among which were encroachments and raids from other people. This eventually lead to the development of specialized warriors. The warriors were inclined to rally around strong men who could lead them into battle. This in time lead to chiefs who began to build empires.
Written history begins with writers recording the valiant accomplishments of their overlords. It is generally true that history is written by the victors. Western history records the empires of the Egyptians, Phoneticians, Persians, Greeks and others. Other early empires were being built and destroyed in Asia and Africa at the same time. All of this represents a process of geographical integration with groups of people coming into contact with new groups of people. Much of the contact was violent and unfriendly with some people being winners and others losers.
The Roman Empire represent the first point in western history that offers something on a scale that might warrant applying the term globalization. At its peak it stretched from Palestine to Britain and from Bavaria to North Africa. The Romans built a wide network of roads that enabled them to move troops and conduct trade mush more efficiently than anything that had occurred previously.
It wasn't so much a matter that the Romans made great technological innovations. Their roads, weapons, aqueducts, etc. had all been developed by someone else. What they were able to do was to develop a powerful military state that could amass vast supplies of slave labor to break up the rocks and pave the roads. The lives of the slaves were of course considered disposable commodities.
At the center of this empire was the city of Rome. It grew into an urban center that required immense resources to support its population. Colonies in Africa were used to produce grain and it was transported in ships powered by slaves.
The resulting bread and gory circuses of gladiators in the coliseum were used to keep a restive populace under control.
Even as the political and military structure of the empire slowly began to come apart allowing other groups to migrate into the area that it had once controlled, Rome left a strong stamp on much of the area that was to become known as Europa. The languages are either directly derived from or heavily influenced by Latin. Its influence can be seen in laws and cultural institutions. Perhaps most significantly the religion that was adopted in the latter days of the empire endured for centuries. The story of Rome that has come down to us was written by Roman historians such as Livy and Tacitus. We don't get a record of how it looked to a farmer in Gaul.
Europe went through a transitional period of about 500 years known as the early middle ages. Various tribes such as the Vandals and the Goths broke through the crumbling imperial defenses. As they settled down various invasions had to be repelled, the Arabs from the east and the Vikings from the north. A point of relative stability was reached around 1000CE. It then became apparent that the result of the centuries of centuries of battle was a serious over supply of warriors who didn't know how to do anything but start wars. If peace and prosperity were ever going to prevail something had to be done with this bunch of nasty louts. The hierarchy of the church hit upon the brilliant idea of sending them off on a crusade to liberate the holy land from the Muslim infidel. Thus was launched the practice of starting wars in the Middle East which has been so perennially popular. While they have never accomplished anything constructive in the Middle East, they have always been a handy device for taking off some pressure back home.
Meanwhile, China had been going through a somewhat similar process of imperial rise and decline. An empire would rise only to have barbarians invade from the periphery and establish a new dynasty. The Ming Dynasty which got underway in the 14th C was a period of significant growth and development. It presents us with one of the truly ironic turning points in the history of globalization. In the late 14th C and early 15th C they embarked on an ambitious program of constructing larger and larger navel vessels and using them to explore new regions. Since the mandarins eventually ordered them destroyed, there is not much information about them available, but artistic reconstructions have been made from the surviving material.
There is general agreement that they were very large and capable of sailing across the open oceans.
They conducted voyages of exploration and trade over the southwest Pacific and Indian oceans. They ultimately reached the southeast coast of Africa. It is entirely plausible that had they continued they would have soon rounded the Cape of Good Hope and eventually arrived in Europe close to 100 years before the great European explorations began. With Europe sill composed of small fragmented nation states, history would surely have turned out differently. For reasons that are not well understood the mandarins were afflicted with an attack of xenophobic fear of the alien influences that these voyages were introducing to the empire. They ordered all of the ships and plans for their construction destroyed.
That is of course is one of those interesting chapters of history that didn't happen the way it might have. What did happen is that during the 15th C Portuguese mariners were experimenting with ship design and gradually creeping their way down the western African coast as they solved the problems of navigation and prevailing trade winds. In 1488 they rounded the Cape of Good Hope. This led to voyages of exploration that eventually took them all the way to China. In 1492 Christopher Columbus set out to get to India by sailing west.
He ran into an interesting piece of real estate on his way. In 1519 Magellan launched the expedition that would circumnavigate the glob. That should definitely qualify as a significant point in the history of globalization.
The European explorations unleashed an era of colonialism and imperialism that continues to the present day. It can fairly be characterized as a general exploitation of the global south at the hands of the global north. The British Empire at its peak girdled the globe as was for 64 years it was reigned over by Victoria Regina, Empress of India.
The 19th C brings us to a period that is frequently described by historians as one of globalization. This was an era of intense Atlantic globalization. Capital, goods and labor flowed westward from Europe to the United Sates. Vast numbers of immigrants arrived at Ellis island.
The investment that flowed from European capitalists was used to build factories in which many of these immigrants labored under difficult and often unsafe conditions.
This vast flow of money and people far surpassed anything that the world had seen up to that point. Towards the end of the 19thC the flow began to stabilize and then to be reversed in an eastward direction. American production, at first agricultural and then manufacturing began to be exported. American capitalists began to acquire control of European enterprises. This tend was greatly accelerated by the upheavals of WWI. At its end the US had emerged as one of the world's dominant powers. The US virtually closed the door to new immigrants and generally adopted an isolationist political posture. The shocks of the Great Depression and WWII brought the process of globalization to a temporary halt.
That brings us to the post war era that has been increasingly dominated by a new process of globalization that neoliberals with considerable sucess have attempted to exploit in the interests of their primary constituencies. I plan to examine those developments in some detail in future diaries.
The point that I would attempt to establish from this brief historical survey is that human history has shown a general trend toward the economic and political integration of larger and larger geographical pieces. It has never been a neutral and even handed process. It is pushed by groups attempting to gain wealth and power. It is resisted by others. It is often temporarily disrupted by major upheavals and collapses.