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1The Pre-modern World
When we talk of ‘globalisation’ we often refer to an economicsystem that has emerged since the last 50 years or so. But as you willsee in this chapter, the making of the global world has a longhistory – of trade, of migration, of people in search of work, themovement of capital, and much else. As we think about the dramaticand visible signs of global interconnectedness in our lives today,we need to understand the phases through which this world inwhich we live has emerged.All through history, human societies have become steadily moreinterlinked. From ancient times, travellers, traders, priests andpilgrims travelled vast distances for knowledge, opportunity andspiritual 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 valleycivilisations with present-day West Asia. For more than a millennia,
cowries 
(the Hindi c
owdi 
or seashells, used as a form of currency)from the Maldives found their way to China and East Africa. Thelong-distance spread of disease-carrying germs may be traced asfar back as the seventh century. By the thirteenth century it hadbecome an unmistakable link.
 
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The 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 shipsappear regularly in memorial stones found inthe western coast, indicating the significanceof oceanic trade.
 
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1.1 Silk Routes Link the World
The silk routes are a good example of vibrant pre-modern tradeand cultural links between distant parts of the world. The name ‘silkroutes’ points to the importance of West-bound Chinese silk cargoesalong this route. Historians have identified several silk routes, overland and by sea, knitting together vast regions of Asia, and linkingAsia with Europe and northern Africa. They are known to haveexisted since before the Christian Era and thrived almost till thefifteenth 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. EarlyChristian missionaries almost certainly travelled this route to Asia, asdid early Muslim preachers a few centuries later. Much before allthis, Buddhism emerged from eastern India and spread in severaldirections 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 theytravelled. Even ‘ready’ foodstuff in distant parts of the world mightshare common origins. Take spaghetti and noodles. It is believedthat noodles travelled west from China tobecome spaghetti. Or, perhaps Arab traderstook pasta to fifth-century Sicily, an island nowin Italy. Similar foods were also known in Indiaand Japan, so the truth about their origins maynever be known. Yet such guesswork suggeststhe possibilities of long-distance cultural contacteven 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 toour ancestors until about five centuries ago.These foods were only introduced in Europeand Asia after Christopher Columbusaccidentally discovered the vast continent thatwould later become known as the Americas.
Fig. 3 – Merchants from Venice and the Orient exchanging goods,from Marco Polo,
Book of Marvels
 , fifteenth century.Fig. 2 – Silk route trade as depicted in aChinese cave painting, eighth century, Cave217, Mogao Grottoes, Gansu, China.
 
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(Here we will use ‘America’ to describe North America, SouthAmerica and the Caribbean.) In fact, many of our common foodscame from America’s original inhabitants – the American Indians.Sometimes the new crops could make the difference between lifeand death. Europe’s poor began to eat better and live longer withthe introduction of the humble potato. Ireland’s poorest peasantsbecame so dependent on potatoes that when disease destroyed thepotato crop in the mid-1840s, hundreds of thousands diedof starvation.
1.3 Conquest, Disease and Trade
The pre-modern world shrank greatly in the sixteenth century afterEuropean sailors found a sea route to Asia and also successfullycrossed the western ocean to America. For centuries before, theIndian Ocean had known a bustling trade, with goods, people,knowledge, customs, etc. criss-crossing its waters. The Indiansubcontinent was central to these flows and a crucial point in theirnetworks. The entry of the Europeans helped expand or redirectsome of these flows towards Europe.Before its ‘discovery’, America had been cut off from regular contactwith the rest of the world for millions of years. But from the sixteenthcentury, its vast lands and abundant crops and minerals began totransform trade and lives everywhere.Precious metals, particularly silver, from mines located in present-day Peru and Mexico also enhanced Europe’s wealth and financedits trade with Asia. Legends spread in seventeenth-century Europeabout South America’s fabled wealth. Many expeditions set off insearch of El Dorado, the fabled city of gold.The Portuguese and Spanish conquest and colonisation of Americawas decisively under way by the mid-sixteenth century. Europeanconquest was not just a result of superior firepower. In fact, themost powerful weapon of the Spanish conquerors was not aconventional military weapon at all. It was the germs such as thoseof smallpox that they carried on their person. Because of their longisolation, America’s original inhabitants had no immunity againstthese diseases that came from Europe. Smallpox in particular proveda deadly killer. Once introduced, it spread deep into the continent,ahead even of any Europeans reaching there. It killed and decimatedwhole communities, paving the way for conquest.
Fig. 4 – The Irish Potato Famine,
IllustratedLondon News
 , 1849.
Hungry children digging for potatoes in a field that has already been harvested, hoping to discover some leftovers. During the Great Irish PotatoFamine (1845 to 1849), around 1,000,000  people died of starvation in Ireland, and double thenumber emigrated in search of work.
 ‘Biological’ warfare?
John Winthorp, the first governor of theMassachusetts Bay colony in New England,wrote in May 1634 that smallpox signalled God’sblessing for the colonists: ‘… the natives … wereneere (near) all dead of small Poxe (pox), so asthe Lord hathe (had) cleared our title to whatwe possess’. Alfred Crosby,
Ecological Imperialism 
.
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