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We’re going to take a very quick romp through the history of globalization, starting in
the deep past, at the beginning of our species and ending with reflections and thoughts and
During many epochs, global scale change, changes in technology, changes in governance, changes
And understanding the dynamics of global scale change is therefore, fascinating, because
it tells the story of humanity, and also useful because it gives us some grounding, some sighting,
some idea about how change may occur in our time and indeed how we should work to guide
the kind of change that we’re going to need in the 21st Century.
I might have called this mini course, globalizations, because we have in fact had distinct eras
And in this first module, I want to introduce those six major waves of globalization that
I’m going to be discussing in this mini course and then start to take a look at the
fundamental principles of how global change occurs, what are the main drivers of global
change, what are the channels or pathways by which change in one part of the world diffuses
And in general, what kinds of lessons might we take from history to give us some help
in understanding the tumultuous changes that are underway in our world today.
And while one could allot history into different bins or different datings, I’m going to
The first of these is the beginning of humanity, what might be called the great dispersal of
homo sapiens, our species, out of Africa and spreading throughout the whole world.
We began as hunters and gatherers, but around 10,000 years ago, an increasing proportion
And that was the so-called Neolithic Revolution, from hunting and gathering to agriculture,
from a nomadic life to a settled life in villages, and then eventually in towns, and eventually
in cities.
The third globalization are the great land based empires of roughly two millennia ago.
The Han Empire in China, the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean region.
The fourth globalization that I’m going to want to discuss is in a way, kind of beginning
of the modern world that we know today, it’s the globalization that took place with the
discoveries of Christopher Columbus on the sea route from Europe to the Americas and
Vasco da Gama on the sea route between Europe and Asia, which connected all parts of the
And that led to profound changes in geopolitics, in the world economy, in ideas and in many
ways was one of the most tumultuous eras and events of human history.
But I’m going to note that it’s also the Anglo-American age.
It’s the period when first, the United Kingdom and then after World War II, the United States,
were the dominant powers of the world and really shaped the world institutionally, in
language, in the use of English as the common language for business and science throughout
the world in knitting together the modern, highly integrated world economy that we live
And the sixth and final of these waves of globalization that I’ll discuss, it won’t
I believe it’s a new globalization, after the Anglo-American period in which we have
We have yet new challenges for our generation and the generations to come in the 21st Century
that really define this period as being yet the start of another new wave of globalization.
Of course, what I mean is the integration of basic structures of society over large
geographical areas.
And in the modern world, across national boundaries and regional boundaries that may include a
When we buy a product from halfway around the world, or when we buy a service, for example,
as a tourist visiting another part of the world, they are linked together through a
now-global financial system where banks in one country lend to banks in other countries
which then on lend to buyers and sellers of goods and services, linking together finance
It’s a system so intertwined that when a bad accident happens in one place, a financial
panic such as exploded in September, 2008 with the failure of a bank in the United States,
We’re linked in production systems, a major company, say one of our iconic companies in
the world today, Apple, producing iPhones and computers and many other products.
may produce the components of those products in dozens of countries, assemble them in multiple
countries, ship them around the world in what we call a global value chain.
And that’s a value chain across companies and across countries and across stages of
An idea that emerges in one place in the world, whether it’s the scientific idea, an artistic
idea, a new ideology, a new concept, a new kind of entertainment, nowadays spreads rapidly
throughout the world, but throughout human history, ideas have spread.
Religious ideas, philosophical ideas, scientific ideas spread throughout the world.
People move.
And while we’re very much aware today of refugees and migrants often trying to escape
war or environmental disasters and find their way to safety, migration has been absolutely
at the essence of the human experience for as long as we have been homo sapiens, as long
Even our ancestors to homo sapiens, other human, members of the human genus were of
course migrating and moving around the world for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of
Politics does not stop at a national boundary, it could never stop at a national boundary.
The issues of national security, war and peace, safety from dangers from other regions and
And we feel today this strong interdependence but interdependence has been a feature of
We didn’t invent globalization, but we do have, as has been true throughout history,
What you’re looking at here is one rendering of the great dispersal, the first wave of
While anthropologists and archaeologists continue to uncover new and very surprising facts about
the evolution of our species, it remains the overwhelming view that homo sapiens are our
But what this map shows is the estimated timing of arrival of the modern human species, homo
sapiens into Europe, into Asia, and into the Americas where it’s believed that...part
of humanity from Asia crossed a land bridge perhaps 12,000 to 15,000 years ago when the
sea level was much below the current level because more water was impounded in the ice
today would call the indigenous or native Amerindian populations of the Americas.
The point is humanity during this dispersal reached all parts of the world from an out
of Africa dispersal that may have started 125,000 years ago or a 100,000 years ago,
still debated.
And that culminated in the arrival of populations to the Americas, perhaps somewhere between
One notable point when humanity arrived almost anywhere, it seems to have contributed, perhaps
ago many of the unique megafauna, the large animal population in Australia was driven
to extinction.
While we sometimes think romantically that indigenous populations live in harmony with
nature, there is a lot of evidence that indigenous populations destroyed nature just as we are
When the Amerindian populations, as we would call them today, arrived from Asia between
10,000 and 20,000 years ago, date still debated, it seems to coincide with the extinction of
the great megafauna, the large land mammals of the Americas, the wooly mammoth and the
But it is a warning.
And that meant that the populations of the Americas did not have the benefit of horses
for work and for transportation for 10,000 years, until the European conquerors came
on horseback and had such advantages of power and military force that they were able to
It seems to be the case that homo sapiens, our species, also may have been the leading
cause of the extinction of our closest relatives, other human species, especially the Neanderthal.
We now know that homo sapiens and the Neanderthal coexisted in Europe 30,000 to 40,000 years
ago.
The Neanderthals went extinct but they remained part of us, modern species, in that almost
all of humanity outside of Africa still carries in our genes, a fraction, small fraction of
So there was interbreeding, but also perhaps mass murder, or at least a competition for
food and other scarce resources that ended up with homo sapiens driving the Neanderthals
to extinction.
And here you’re looking at a map where the green-shaded areas are the places where agriculture
started.
What do we know?s
It was a process of learning and invention and breeding of wild species so that the humans
began deliberately to grow and cultivate crops rather than simply to gather the natural output
of crops.
And this process of developing the capacity for settled agriculture occurred independently
So this is a case of multiple discoveries over a few thousand years, roughly at a similar
time at the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the modern climate period called
In the Eurasian context, in two major sites, the Fertile Crescent of what is now Iraq and
between the Tigris and Euphrates, where wheat cultivation began.
And in China, both in the Yellow Sea and the Yangtze River basins where millet and rice
began to be cultivated.
In the Americas, the invention of agriculture in North America was around maize.
In the southwest of what is today’s United States and in parts of Mexico and in South
When it comes to crops, the diffusion is guided by geography because crops like wheat can
Grains like rice grow especially in certain ecological areas, the subtropics, or monsoon
But the diffusion is carried by observation, imitation and the migration of people themselves.
The third great era of globalization that we would like to study are the ancient empires,
the Roman Empire that you see on the map around the Mediterranean basin.
The Han Empire that you see in east Asia where China was unified as a great nation with boundaries
The Parthian Empire of today’s Iran and a civilization that has played a rich and
No longer small villages, but now great empires and global scale trade, massive trade between
Asia and Europe, over land, over the famed Silk Roads and land routes.
Of course, not the scale of trade and integration made possible by modern transport, but still
already 2,000 years ago a real globalization, not that connected the Old World and the Americas,
that would still take 1,500 years more to arrive with ocean-based navigation, but connecting
Europe, Asia and parts of Africa in global trade already two millennia ago.
With the discoveries of ocean-based navigation between Europe and the newly Americas, following
Christopher Columbus’ 1492 voyage and then all of the voyages that followed with the
sea routes between Europe and Asia that Vasco da Gama first pioneered in 1498, the entire
world became integrated in an era of globalization that one could say was really the beginning
of modern globalization, in which all parts of the world, Europe, Asia, Africa, North
America, South America were now part of a global system of trade and increasingly a
In the last 200 years, a new phase arose, mainly because of a dramatic breakthrough
of technology that we’ll be looking at, the arrival of the modern era of energy, starting
with the steam engine and the progenitor of that breakthrough, the United Kingdom, really
And with the advent of the modern industrial age, Britain became the predominant power
for 150 years, roughly from the start of the 19th Century to the middle of the 20th Century
and then handed the baton to the United States, a country that had its roots in Britain, of
course.
And one could say that the Anglo-American world, first the U.K., then the United States,
dominated the world scene in an industrial age that lasted from roughly the beginning
of the 19th Century, say 1800, till the end of the 20th Century, at roughly the year 2000.
Then I believe we have entered a new era, an era of the 21st Century, no longer an Anglo-American
world, now a world in which power is diffuse, in which there are more centers of power and
in which yet a new wave of technology, information technology is again changing the nature, the
What do we learn from this very, very quick overview that extends for a 100,000 years?
First, change is global scale and it has been for our species from the start.
What gets invented in one place diffuses widely, maybe according to ecological characteristics
where food can be grown or maybe globally, such as when the invention of the mobile phone
We have seen many unexpected changes at dramatic global scale take place that were almost
unanticipated
I’ll just cite a few that we’ll look at throughout this mini course.
We went from the age of European imperialism in Africa, which began in the 1880s, to the
decolonization of Africa and the rise of independent nation states in Africa roughly in three-quarters
of a century.
We went from the invention of the Soviet Union with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and
the birth of the Soviet Union itself in the early 1920s, to the sudden end and dissolution
of the Soviet Union in 1991, a shocking event, little anticipated, global ramifications.
We went from British supremacy with great British power and influence and seeming predominance
around 1913 to essentially the end of the British Empire just four decades later.
Unimaginable.
Unthinkable.
And perhaps we’re in a similar way seeing a rapid relative decline of American power.
America thought it would run the show after the decline of the British Empire, but America’s
power and weight in the world is clearly being challenged and in relative terms, other parts
of the world, and notably east Asia, are becoming major, major forces of geopolitics, of technology,
of the world economy and that too has proceeded very rapidly.
What are the dangers that take place when these mega disruptions occur?
One thing we can say is that a lot of these disruptions have been occasioned by war.
And that is a reality that I believe has to be fundamental to our investigation.
We’ve had several of them, global scale wars, but now we have the technology in which
And I often refer to the wise words of President John F. Kennedy who almost defined
our modern existential reality: “The world is very different now, for man holds in his
moral hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”
We can’t afford to have the kinds of disruptions that we had in the past lest we lose everything.
With that in mind, with the risks that disruption brings, conflict, I want us to keep in mind
three great questions as we use our backward look at globalization to try to gain insights
First, can the world truly choose a path of shared prosperity, social inclusion for all,
and environmental sustainability in this sixth wave of globalization of the 21st Century?
Second, how should our global governance, our geopolitics be organized if it is true
as seems likely that the Anglo-American age has ended and we are now in a truly multi-polar
world where there are important powers throughout the world that need to find new ways to
cooperate?
And on what model of statecraft and on global cooperation can we build an era of global
peace?
1. technology
2. physical environment
3. demograpgy
4. war
5. ideology
6. political institutions
6. cultutal institutions