The Making of a Global World PDF

Chapter III The Making of a Global World 1 The Pre-modern World When we talk of ‘globalisation’ we often refer to an economic system that has emerged since the last 50 years or so. But as you will see in this chapter, the making of the global world has a long history – of trade, of migration, of peo...

Chapter III The Making of a Global World 1 The Pre-modern World When we talk of ‘globalisation’ we often refer to an economic system that has emerged since the last 50 years or so. But as you will see in this chapter, 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. As we think about the dramatic and visible signs of global interconnectedness in our lives today, we need to understand the phases through which this world in which we live has emerged. All through history, human societies have become steadily more interlinked. From ancient times, travellers, traders, priests and pilgrims travelled vast distances for knowledge, opportunity and World 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 Global 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. a of MakingThe Making of a Global World Fig. 1 – Image of a ship on a memorial stone, Goa Museum, tenth century CE. From the ninth century, images of ships The appear regularly in memorial stones found in the western coast, indicating the significance of oceanic trade. 53 2024-25  1.1 Silk Routes Link the World 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. 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. Fig. 2 – Silk route trade as depicted in a Trade and cultural exchange always went hand in hand. Early Chinese cave painting, eighth century, Cave Christian missionaries almost certainly travelled this route to Asia, as 217, Mogao Grottoes, Gansu, China. 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. 1.2 Food Travels: Spaghetti and Potato Food offers many examples of long-distance cultural exchange. Traders and 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 India and the Contemporary World never be known. Yet such guesswork suggests the possibilities of long-distance cultural contact even in the pre-modern world. Many of our common foods such as potatoes, soya, groundnuts, maize, 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 Fig. 3 – Merchants from Venice and the Orient exchanging goods, from Marco Polo, Book of Marvels, fifteenth century. would later become known as the Americas. 54 2024-25 (Here we will use ‘America’ to describe North America, South America and the Caribbean.) 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. 1.3 Conquest, Disease and Trade 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. 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 Fig. 4 – The Irish Potato Famine, Illustrated with the rest of the world for millions of years. But from the sixteenth London News, 1849. Hungry children digging for potatoes in a field that century, its vast lands and abundant crops and minerals began to has already been harvested, hoping to discover transform trade and lives everywhere. some leftovers. During the Great Irish Potato Famine (1845 to 1849), around 1,000,000 Precious metals, particularly silver, from mines located in present- people died of starvation in Ireland, and double the number emigrated in search of work. 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 The Making of a Global World was decisively under way by the mid-sixteenth century. European Box 1 conquest was not just a result of superior firepower. In fact, the ‘Biological’ warfare? most powerful weapon of the Spanish conquerors was not a John Winthorp, the first governor of the conventional military weapon at all. It was the germs such as those Massachusetts Bay colony in New England, of smallpox that they carried on their person. Because of their long wrote in May 1634 that smallpox signalled God’s isolation, America’s original inhabitants had no immunity against blessing for the colonists: ‘… the natives … were neere (near) all dead of small Poxe (pox), so as these diseases that came from Europe. Smallpox in particular proved the Lord hathe (had) cleared our title to what a deadly killer. Once introduced, it spread deep into the continent, we possess’. ahead even of any Europeans reaching there. It killed and decimated Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism. whole communities, paving the way for conquest. 55 2024-25  Guns could be bought or captured and turned against the invaders. New words But not diseases such as smallpox to which the conquerors were Dissenter – One who refuses to accept mostly immune. established beliefs and practices 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 Discuss restricted overseas contacts and retreated into isolation. China’s Explain what we mean when we say that the reduced role and the rising importance of the Americas gradually world ‘shrank’ in the 1500s. moved the centre of world trade westwards. Europe now emerged as the centre of world trade. India and the Contemporary World Fig. 5 – Slaves for sale, New Orleans, Illustrated London News, 1851. A prospective buyer carefully inspecting slaves lined up before the auction. You can see two children along with four women and seven men in top hats and suit waiting to be sold. To attract buyers, slaves were often dressed in their best clothes. 56 2024-25