The historical pedigree of globalisation - Essay Example

Is globalisation unique to the post-1945 era and, if not, are there differences between historical and modern globalisation? For many, globalisation has been a defining characteristic, or even the defining characteristic, of the post-war period. However, as we will see, it is not so easy to rope off globalisation as an exclusively post-war, or even exclusively modern phenomenon. Furthermore, it has been a Eurocentric phenomenon, as reinforced by Marxist and Classical Liberal theories, with the Eastern peoples merely the passive objects in the story. For many scholars in recent centuries, the global narrative since Columbus reached the Americas in 1492 has been one of the steady growth of Western power and influence across the world, culminating in a Western dominance of a globalised economy after the Second World War. Such theories have also worked on the assumption that Europe, uniquely, always had the potential to take the lead on the global stage, and to develop further and faster than other regions, largely because of its native urge towards a Capitalist economy, and liberal institutions. We shall see that this is not only not the full picture, but that it is a deeply flawed and misleading picture. Globalisation is not new, but Western dominance in globalising processes is new. The aim of this essay is to explore the historical pedigree of globalisation; decide, by assessing the various theories on the matter, when globalisation can be dated to; and to identify similarities and differences between globalisation in the past and contemporary, or post-1945, globalisation. While Eurocentric theories were once the norm in academic discourse, they have undergone serious challenges in recent decades. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) shook historians’ complacency about the European boundaries of their work. He argued that the West justified its domination by portraying non-European societies as backward and exotic, and that these visions of Asiatic societies are deeply woven into canonical European literature. It was not just Said who challenged Eurocentric norms. The latter also came under attack by those engaged in Subaltern studies in relation to the history of the Indian Subcontinent, and scholars of revisionism in Africa. In addition, other historical studies established the great significance on non-European regions to global economy and society at various times. Notably, Abu-Lughod (1989) argued for the centrality of the Middle East in world history and global exchange, while Gunder Frank (1998) posited the importance of East and Southeast Asia in truly global trading networks. Notions of globalisation which played up the importance of the Western world were generally focused on the post-1945 era, but much of the above literature has rethought globalisation as a much longer-term phenomenon, as well as one which started in the East. A key reason why Western scholars were long unable to recognise that globalisation predated the 20th century was that they have long viewed it in terms of the rise of Western Capitalism. As Hobson (2007) points out, none of the leading economies between 500 and 1800 CE were Western. Globalisation in past centuries was largely fuelled by the wealth and communications of industries and markets that stretched across Asia, and China and India stand out as particularly important global players for much of recorded history. In the 18th century, China accounted for an astonishing 25% of the world’s population, compared to 20% today (Flynn and Giráldez 2006, p. 239), and when European merchants first moved East in search of new opportunities, they should not be regarded as the first signs of an emerging European dominance, but rather as an attempt by a less economically productive region to gain footholds in the trade with the world’s economic powerhouse. Hobson (2007) maintains that China maintained a dominant role in the global economy even later than suggested by Gunder Frank. He states that it continued to outstrip Britain in its share of world manufacturing input until as late as 1860, and that the West had only caught up with the East in terms of GNP by 1870. Eurocentrists long claimed that after the return of Zheng He’s huge treasure fleets to China, and the ban on Chinese involvement in overseas trade, the empire turned inwards and entered a period of stagnation and decline. This is scarcely borne out by the facts, and much of the misguided Western literature has stemmed from too literal a reading of Confucian documents which paint the ideal picture of isolation (Hobson 2007, p. 154). Revisionist literature portrays Chinese trade as continuing to prosper, with most of the world’s silver passing through China. The ban on overseas trading was largely ignored, with some trade through certain East coast ports being officially sanctioned, while other Chinese merchants overcame this difficulty by sailing under the flags of foreign powers. Furthermore, its centralised bureaucracy, the low taxes on trade, and the essentially laissez-faire attitudes of successive Chinese emperors, created prime conditions for Chinese international trade. Therefore, we can dismiss the image of the obstructive and reactionary oriental despot. Furthermore, the tribute system was in fact a trading system, with vassals paying nominal tribute for access to China’s lucrative markets. This was such a successful policy that even Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch traders requested admittance to Chinese markets as vassals (Hobson 2007, p. 154). Other historians have claimed that Islam and Confucianism were both anathema to development in the East, and yet Classical Islam can quite possibly be credited with facilitating the first emergence of globalisation, while Confucian values would later influence European ideas of mercantilism. China’s textile production was far superior to that offered in Europe for millennia, and its transportation and energy systems were hugely progressive, from the systems of canals and locks that made up the Grand Canal, to water mills and water-powered bellows in the blast furnaces. It is helpful to look at the dominant role of China in the global silver trade for several centuries, given that it powered long-distance exchange processes for a long period before the 20th century, and the period of Western dominance. Eurocentric historians have often thought in terms of a flow of silver to China, and a flow of Chinese products, including silk and ceramics, to Europe. However, following Flynn and Giráldez (2006), it seems more creditable to think of a flow of silver from the abundant mines of Latin America between the 1540s and 1640s, which then passed mostly through Europe and on to China, which, after the collapse of a sophisticated paper money system under the Ming dynasty, reverted to a silver economy, and so demand was very high there, with prices twice as high as those elsewhere. Later on, silver would be sidelined by opium, as British merchants traded Bengali opium for Chinese tea. It is clear that exchange on a global scale, often powered by Chinese demand and production, was the norm for centuries before the current era. There can be little debate over the fact that the Western powers dominated the world, in political and economic terms, after the Industrial Revolution had permitted their rapid development. What should not be forgotten is that just two centuries ago, India and China still accounted for two-thirds of global economic output (Flynn and Giráldez 2006, p. 243). Trade is an obvious factor which has drive globalising processes throughout world history. Merchants will always seek the most lucrative markets for their products, and middlemen will always seek the profits to be made in the carrying trade. At the same time, markets will always desire exotic and foreign goods. However, Bentley (2004) also suggested that empire and religious mission have driven efforts to understand the wider world (p.69). In terms of mission, after the emergence of Buddhism in Northern India, Buddhist missionaries paid close attention to Chinese culture and values across the Himalayas in order to work out how best to seek the disseminate of their message of enlightenment. Islam, meanwhile, has some claim to being the world’s first globalised religion (Held et al. 1999, p. 415). From its 7th century beginnings in the Arabian desert, it rapidly spread to much of Asia, South-Eastern and South-Western Europe, North Africa, Central Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. In terms of empire, the stunning series of victories which gave the Mongols, having united the tribes of the Steppe, control over much of the Eurasian landmass, from China to the edges of Europe, provided a pacified area under a central political authority, which obviously made trading across that vast region considerably easier than in times of political fragmentation. Given that mission, empire and trade have been important human activities for millennia, we can safely assume that they have been contributing to process of regional integration, and later to globalisation, for at least as long. Different scholars have wildly different opinions on when globalisation can be dated to. The process of selecting a date or era as a dividing line between a non-globalised and a globalised world is, of necessity, often artificial and precarious. However, some scholars have still selected a particular year, or even event, which they hold to be crucial to this dividing line. For Flynn and Giráldez (2006), globalisation began, very specifically, in 1571, the year in which Manila, now the capital of the Philippines, was founded as an entrepôt in the carrying trade between the Americas and the rest of the world: ‘Prior to that year, the world was not fully coherent or complete; after that year it was’ (p. 235). As they point out, when we talk of globalisation, we are talking of the processes by which increasingly-integrated regions become increasingly integrated with each other in terms of trade, communications and cultural exchange, and at some point this process of integration becomes known as globalisation. Flynn and Giráldez (2006) maintain that while much of Africa and the Eurasian landmass had been interconnected for several thousands of years, it is only with the permanent connection of the New World to the Old that we can talk of globalisation, rather than integration, and 1571 was the year in which they hold this to have occurred. They ask how it is possible to talk of globalisation if a large part of the globe is excluded, and propose that we should only use the term to refer to the period after all of the major inhabited landmasses were permanently linked by trade. Even this is not enough – they state that not only must trade be continuous, as opposed to the one-off expeditions of Columbus or Cabot, but that the process of mutual exchange must have a lasting impact on all parties involved. This was certainly the case in the early exchanges between the Old World and the New. The diseases from the former, including smallpox, from which the populations of the Americas had previously been insulated by sheer distance and isolation, decimated the native population in a matter of a few years. Then there was the introduction of commercial crops and domesticated large animals in the Americas, as well as the transportation of slaves there, while American crops were also taken to other continents. The demography and landscapes of the New World would never be the same again. All this is valid in the framework that Flynn and Giráldez (2006) have set up, but the notion that we cannot use the term globalisation before the integration of the Americas seems unworkable. After all, both before and after that date other communities worldwide remained totally isolated from long-distance trading networks – the Aborigines in Australia and the Polynesian settlers of many Pacific islands, to name but a few. Rather than fixing the start of globalisation on a specific date, it is helpful to think of it as a series of processes, which can perhaps be best dated to around 500 CE, with a substantial expansion of global trade from around 600. A series of interlinked empires, from T’ang China, through the Islamic Umayyad Caliphate ruled from Damascus, and later the Abbasid Caliphate ruled from Baghdad, and through the Fatimid lands in North Africa, facilitated routes stretching from the Iberian peninsula to the east coast of China. At this stage, the trade routes extended across Eurasia from China to Western Europe, and down into Arabia and Africa. In the early centuries, the long-distance trade was centred on Arabia and West Asia, where the camel caravans were crucial to the transport of goods, and centres such as Baghdad and Mecca has been established as important regional hubs. There were three main trade routes in this system, as outlined by Abu-Lughod (1989). The northern route, formed when the Mongols pacified huge area of Eurasia, stretched from the fringes of China through Central Asia and then onto the Middle East and Eastern Europe, although this route was in decline from about the middle of the 14th century. The second, or middle route, passed through the lands of the Islamic powers and through the Levant and Constantinople into Europe. The southern route passed through Egypt and the Red Sea, and also involved seaborne routes across the Indian Ocean and down the East Coast of Africa. Then, perhaps from around 1100 CE, the centre of gravity of global trade shifted East towards China, and the latter retained its dominance in this respect for many centuries, and arguably into the 19th century. Abu-Lughod (1989) wrote of the existence of a world economy during this period, organised through a string of trading cities, from Venice and Bruges in Europe, to Cairo in Egypt and Baghdad in Mesopotamia, and then on to the Central Asian cities of Samarkand and into China. Philip Curtin (1984) traced back cross-regional trade over long distances over thousands of years. Nevertheless, these theories do not tend to see globalisation as a steady process leading from humble beginnings to the institutionalised globalisation of the post-1945 era; rather, they posit periods of substantive trade and cultural contact followed by periods of less active contact. For example, Abu-Lughod’s (1989) network of trading links broke down under the pressure of the Black Death and the Mongol invasions. Gunder Frank (1998) settled on the period from about 1400 to 1800 as a time of ‘Asian hegemony’ in global terms, stating that during this era, India and China enjoyed ‘greater absolute and relative productivity [than Western Europe] in industry, agriculture, transport and trade’ (p. 62). Some may question the use of the term ‘industry’ at so early a date, given that Eurocentrists do not acknowledge an industrial revolution until it occurred in Europe in the 19th century. However, many historians have confidently claimed an ‘industrial revolution’ of sorts for China under the Song dynasty, around 1100. By 1078, the amount and cheapness of iron produced in China was such that it was not matched by Britain until the beginning of the 19th century (Hobson 2007, p. 153). The crucial point is that after around 500 CE, the Persians, Arabs, Indians, Jews, and Chinese, among others, built up and sustained a global system of economic exchange, by which most the world’s major civilisations were continuously linked for many hundreds of years. In this revised chronology, Europe appears as a very late developer indeed, and when it did start to flourish, it seems that it did so with the knowledge and expertise gained from trade routes with the East. Hobson (2007) goes so far as to claim that ‘every major turning point in the rise of Western capitalism was informed by the assimilation of more advanced Eastern resource portfolios’ (p. 155). For example, theories of the division of labour, printing, and property law, all of which were crucial to the later development of the Capitalist West, which would then assert its influence worldwide, all originated to the East (Holton, 1998, p. 44). Following the same theme, Hobson (2007) suggests the significance of the fact that between the 16th and early 19th centuries, while Western imperialism was having a huge impact on the Americas, it was having very little impact at all in Asia (p. 142). Perhaps one reason was the continuing power of China and India in this period, and their dominance in the global economy. While Italian merchants from trading cities such as Genoa, Florence and Venice are usually held to be the main instigators of a commercial revolution which spread across Europe, they had themselves acquired expertise in such matters through contact with foreign merchants. It was, after all, the Italians who handled much of Europe’s trade with the East. Furthermore, while European historians have sometimes emphasised the crucial importance of the so-called ‘Voyages of Discovery’ – the expeditions of such figures as Columbus, Magellan and Da Gama – many of the navigational and shipbuilding techniques which they relied on had been brought to them on the trading routes from the East. Ironically, perhaps, it was Eastern technology which would allow the first Westerners to begin asserting their presence in global waters. In military terms, likewise, the innovations came in from the East, and specifically China. Hobson (2007) notes the huge advances made by Chinese military engineers. They had gunpowder from 880, a metal-barrelled gun from 1275, and a cannon from 1288 (p. 156). As to the differences between historical and post-1945 globalisation, Held et al. 1999 were surely correct in their assertion that the impact of the Second World War was so great that we can consider the post-war era as completely separated from the globalisation that had gone before (p. 424). Globalisation since 1945 can be distinguished from what went before partly by the huge range of areas on which it has had a transformative effect. In law, there are now international treaties with hundreds of countries acting as signatories, and global conventions on the conduct of war and on human rights. All areas of the economy have been affected, with unprecedented regulation at a global level through institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, both of which were established at the 1944 Bretton-Woods conference. Huge advances in transport, notably the advent of jet-powered air travel, and in communications, especially in terms of greater accessibility to telecommunications, and of course, the advent of the internet, have allowed individuals worldwide to enjoy remarkable access to all manner of information, and a means of communication with other individuals practically anywhere on Earth. Scholte (2000) summed this up when he noted that hundreds of millions of people, and perhaps more, now experience audio or visual or audio-visual contact with others who had previously been distant from them, several times a day. Then there has been the worldwide circulation of cultural products, such as films, TV shows, and books. There have also been waves of migration on a global scale, with large numbers moving from former European colonies in Africa Asia to the former imperial powers in Europe, as well as large numbers of Asians and Latin Americans migrating to North America. Finally, the emergence of global warming and climate change as a threat to humanity worldwide has required that nation-states and individuals work together to try and address these issues at a global level. More than all of these points, there is something more intangible, and yet incredibly pervasive, which separates historical globalisation from that which has taken place post-1945. Just as Benedict Anderson (1983) wrote of ‘imagined communities’ with reference to nationalism, it is surely appropriate in our era, for the first time in human history, to talk of humanity as an ‘imagined community’. Individuals from very different continents and environments and who live very different lifestyles are able to think of the world as one, to think of challenges they face as challenges for all people to face together, and to seek support anywhere on earth. In every area and in terms of scale, pre-1945 globalisation, while it certainly existed, was of an altogether different character. It is interesting that the revisionist literature which re-established China and India in particular as major players in the world economy for much of recorded history has emerged just as those countries are themselves re-emerging as major economic players today. It seems that, at last, the true innovation and importance of those regions in global history and the historiography of globalisation is being recognised. Certainly globalisation processes have undergone a dramatic intensification in the last century, and particularly in the period since the Second World War, but a long-term perspective is to be desired, given that globalisation remains a salient concept even before the advent of the Western Capitalist powers. Whether one chooses to date back globalisation over several millennia, or over five-hundred years, to argue that it is not appropriate to talk of globalisation before the Second World War is to be tied to an excessively narrow definition. It is most credible to argue that globalisation properly so-called has been in motion since about the 6th century CE, but that the last 60 years have witnessed globalisation of an altogether more pervasive and intense character. McNeill (2006) was therefore surely right in suggesting that while globalisation was not itself new, the dramatic intensification of globalising processes after about 1950 was so great as to change life almost everywhere – ‘Such a world-wide tsunami is indeed new’ (p. 285). References Abu-Lughod, J (1989) Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250-1350, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Anderson, B (1983) Imagined Communities, Virago, London. Bentley, J H (2004) ‘Globalizing history and historicizing globalization’, Globalizations 1.1. Curtin, P D (1984) Cross-cultural Trade in World History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 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McNeill, W H (2006) ‘World History and Globalization’ in A G Hopkins (ed) Global History: Interactions Between the Universal and the Local, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Pieterse, J N (2006) ‘Oriental globalization: past and present’ in G Delanty (ed) Europe and Asia beyond East and West, Routledge, Abingdon. Robertson, R (1992) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, Sage, London. Scholte, J A (2000) Globalization: A Critical Introduction, Macmillan, Basingstoke. Read More