THE UNREADEN TALES OF HISTORY

THE MAKING OF A GLOBAL WORLD [PART-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

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.

♦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.

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.

♦ 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

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

would later become known as the Americas. (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.

♦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

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. In fact, 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.

→The Nineteenth Century (1815-1914)

The world changed profoundly in the nineteenth century. Economic,

political, social, cultural and technological factors interacted in

complex ways to transform societies and reshape external relations.

Economists identify three types of movement or ‘flows’ within

international economic exchanges. The first is the flow of trade which

in the nineteenth century referred largely to trade in goods (e.g.,

cloth or wheat). The second is the flow of labour – the migration

of people in search of employment. The third is the movement of

capital for short-term or long-term investments over long distances.

All three flows were closely interwoven and affected peoples’ lives

more deeply now than ever before. The interconnections could

sometimes be broken – for example, labour migration was often

more restricted than goods or capital flows. Yet it helps us understand

the nineteenth-century world economy better if we look at the

three flows together.

→A World Economy Takes Shape

A good place to start is the changing pattern of food production

and consumption in industrial Europe. Traditionally, countries liked

to be self-sufficient in food. But in nineteenth-century Britain,

self-sufficiency in food meant lower living standards and social

conflict. Why was this so?

Population growth from the late eighteenth century had increased

the demand for food grains in Britain. As urban centres expanded

and industry grew, the demand for agricultural products went

up, pushing up food grain prices. Under pressure from landed

groups, the government also restricted the import of corn. The

laws allowing the government to do this were commonly known as

the ‘Corn Laws’. Unhappy with high food prices, industrialists and

urban dwellers forced the abolition of the Corn Laws.

After the Corn Laws were scrapped, food could be imported into

Britain more cheaply than it could be produced within the country.

British agriculture was unable to compete with imports. Vast areas

of land were now left uncultivated, and thousands of men and

women were thrown out of work. They flocked to the cities or

migrated overseas. As food prices fell, consumption in Britain rose. From the mid-

nineteenth century, faster industrial growth in Britain also led to higher

incomes, and therefore more food imports. Around the world – in

Eastern Europe, Russia, America and Australia – lands were cleared

and food production expanded to meet the British demand.

It was not enough merely to clear lands for agriculture. Railways

were needed to link the agricultural regions to the ports. New

harbours had to be built and old ones expanded to ship the new

cargoes. People had to settle on the lands to bring them under

cultivation. This meant building homes and settlements. All these

activities in turn required capital and labour. Capital flowed from

financial centres such as London. The demand for labour in places

where labour was in short supply – as in America and Australia –

led to more migration.

Nearly 50 million people emigrated from Europe to America and

Australia in the nineteenth century. All over the world some 150

million are estimated to have left their homes, crossed oceans and

vast distances over land in search of a better future. Thus by 1890, a global agricultural economy had taken shape,

accompanied by complex changes in labour movement patterns,

capital flows, ecologies and technology. Food no longer came from

a nearby village or town, but from thousands of miles away. It was

not grown by a peasant tilling his own land, but by an agricultural

worker, perhaps recently arrived, who was now working on a large

farm that only a generation ago had most likely been a forest. It was

transported by railway, built for that very purpose, and by ships

which were increasingly manned in these decades by low-paid

workers from southern Europe, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Some of this dramatic change, though on a smaller scale, occurred

closer home in west Punjab. Here the British Indian government

built a network of irrigation canals to transform semi-desert wastes

into fertile agricultural lands that could grow wheat and cotton for

export. The Canal Colonies, as the areas irrigated by the new canals

were called, were settled by peasants from other parts of Punjab.

Of course, food is merely an example. A similar story can be told

for cotton, the cultivation of which expanded worldwide to feed

British textile mills. Or rubber. Indeed, so rapidly did regional

specialisation in the production of commodities develop, that

between 1820 and 1914 world trade is estimated to have multiplied

25 to 40 times. Nearly 60 per cent of this trade comprised ‘primary

products’ – that is, agricultural products such as wheat and cotton,

and minerals such as coal.

→Role of Technology

What was the role of technology in all this? The railways, steamships,

the telegraph, for example, were important inventions without

which we cannot imagine the transformed nineteenth-century world.

But technological advances were often the result of larger social,

political and economic factors. For example, colonisation stimulated

new investments and improvements in transport: faster railways,

lighter wagons and larger ships helped move food more cheaply

and quickly from faraway farms to final markets. The trade in meat offers a good example of this connected process.

Till the 1870s, animals were shipped live from America to Europe

and then slaughtered when they arrived there. But live animals took

up a lot of ship space. Many also died in voyage, fell ill, lost weight,

or became unfit to eat. Meat was hence an expensive luxury beyond

the reach of the European poor. High prices in turn kept demand

and production down until the development of a new technology,

namely, refrigerated ships, which enabled the transport of perishable

foods over long distances.

Now animals were slaughtered for food at the starting point – in

America, Australia or New Zealand – and then transported to

Europe as frozen meat. This reduced shipping costs and lowered

meat prices in Europe. The poor in Europe could now consume

a more varied diet. To the earlier monotony of bread and potatoes

many, though not all, could now add meat (and butter and eggs)

to their diet. Better living conditions promoted social peace within

the country and support for imperialism abroad.