The Making of a Global World
The pre-modern world
Describe how the world was connected before the modern age.
Globalisation is old. We often think the world became connected only in the last 50 years or so. In fact, people have always travelled far: traders, priests, pilgrims, people looking for work or fleeing persecution. They carried goods, money, skills, ideas, inventions, and even germs.
- By 3000 BCE, coastal trade linked the Indus valley with West Asia.
- Cowries (seashells used as money) from the Maldives reached China and East Africa.
- Ships carved on memorial stones in Goa show how important sea trade was.
The silk routes. Several routes, by land and by sea, linked Asia with Europe and North Africa, from before the Christian Era until about the 15th century. They are named after Chinese silk going west, but they also carried Chinese pottery, and spices and textiles from India and Southeast Asia. Europe paid with gold and silver, which flowed east. Ideas travelled too: Buddhism spread from eastern India, and later Christian missionaries and Muslim preachers used the same routes.
Food travels. Maybe Chinese noodles went west and became spaghetti; or maybe Arab traders took pasta to Sicily. We may never know, but the guesswork shows how far cultures could reach. Many foods we eat every day (potatoes, maize, tomatoes, chillies, groundnuts, soya, sweet potatoes) were unknown in India and Europe until roughly five hundred years ago. They came from America's original inhabitants, and reached Europe and Asia only after Columbus reached the Americas.
The potato: life and death. With potatoes, Europe's poor ate better and lived longer. But Ireland's poorest peasants came to depend on them so much that, when a disease wiped out their potatoes in the mid-1840s, hundreds of thousands starved to death, and even more emigrated in search of work.
The world shrinks (16th century). European sailors discovered how to reach Asia by sea, and crossed the ocean to America. The Indian Ocean already had busy trade, with the Indian subcontinent at its centre; Europeans redirected some of it towards Europe. Silver from mines in today's Peru and Mexico made Europe richer and paid for its trade with Asia. Legends of El Dorado, a city of gold, sent many expeditions searching.
Germs as weapons. The Spanish and Portuguese conquered America by the mid-16th century, and not mainly with guns. Their strongest weapon was germs, like smallpox, carried on their bodies. America's people had been cut off for so long that they had no immunity. Smallpox spread ahead of the Europeans, wiping out whole communities. Guns can be captured and turned on invaders; diseases cannot. Then, by the 18th century, America's plantations grew cotton and sugar for Europe using slaves captured in Africa. Meanwhile China turned inward, and the centre of world trade moved west, to Europe.
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