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The web of human communication spread slowly and sporadically beginning with the earliest foraging populations in East Africa, but people remained unconscious of their global reach until European navigators sailed across the Pacific after 1492. Social, economic, and cultural impacts ensued as technologies and travel advanced globalization during the Industrial Revolution and into the twentieth-first century.
Ever since humans achieved their distinctive powers of speech and started to expand beyond the savanna lands of East Africa, contacts with neighbors kept separate bands in occasional touch with one another; and exchanges of genes allowed them to remain a single species even after spreading entirely around the globe. A slender global web of communication sporadically interrupted in remote locations— sometimes for centuries or longer—continued to unite humankind. But as long as people knew nearby neighbors only, no one was conscious of the global reach of the human web.
Even after about 100 BCE when peoples as far apart as the Chinese, western Asians and Europeans became aware of one another through military expeditions and trade, their consciousness remained restricted to Eurasia. Centuries of improvement in transportation gradually expanded the reach and intensity of contacts within the Old World, and parallel though less capacious linkages also developed in the Americas. The spread of bows and arrows from Eurasia to the Americas, beginning about 100 CE, and still spreading among the Caribbean islands when Columbus arrived in 1492, is the firmest evidence we have of how the two systems sometimes interacted, at a time when bows and arrows were still unknown in Australia and islands of the Pacific.
Globalization only became conscious when European navigators discovered America, and then sailed across the Pacific between 1492 and 1519. At first only a few were aware of the new contacts Europeans ships thus inaugurated. The news spread rapidly among the literate classes within Europe, thanks to printing and mapmakers; elsewhere reaction was slower and less enthusiastic.
The most significant effect, initially, was the transfer of infectious diseases from disease-experienced populations of Eurasia to previously isolated peoples, who lacked inherited resistance to the new infections. They therefore suffered disastrous die-offs when exposed to a series of lethal diseases like smallpox, influenza, and measles. Small islands were wholly depopulated; Amerindians in Mexico and Peru suffered something like 80 percent die-off within the first 120 years of exposure; and comparable losses occurred in Pacific islands and among previously isolated peoples elsewhere.
Colonists from Europe and slaves from Africa soon started to supplant the demoralized and diminished Amerindians. A lengthy process of frontier expansion at the expense of Indian peoples ensued in both North and South America, ending in the United States, according to the official census, only in 1890. The rise of the United States and other American nations like Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Canada radically altered the older Eurasian balance of power and population. This was the principal change resulting from the first phase of globalization.
As infectious diseases reached their climatic limits and local human populations developed similar levels of resistance to them, and as doctors simultaneously learned how to control infections with vaccination and antibiotics, epidemics ceased to play such a significant role in human affairs. Nonetheless, globalization continued to upset existing social arrangements everywhere, mainly through increasing economic and cultural impacts.
That in turn depended on the rapid improvement in transport and communication that arose from increasing reliance on machines and inanimate energy, which historians often refer to as the Industrial Revolution. Coal-burning steam engines were the first to power factories (1785), steamships (1807) and railroads (1825). In due course, oil and electricity supplemented and often supplanted coal as a preferred source of power. Instantaneous communication was inaugurated with the electric telegraph (1837). Telephone (1876), radio (1895), movies (1895), airplanes (1903), TV (1936), and computers (1946) followed in rapid succession, each affecting few at first, but rapidly expanding their scale of operation and altering the daily lives of a majority of humankind.
The resulting sudden assault on older habits and routines is what globalization has come to mean in recent years. In economics, its principal manifestation was a vast expansion of international trade and especially the spectacular rise of China as an exporter of manufactured goods after 1978. Cheap, often excellent consumer goods made in China flooded into the United States and other countries, sometimes displacing local manufacturers. The banking and financial crisis that began in the United States in 2008 and soon spread to the rest of the globe intensified the pressure on the U.S. and European manufacturers. The bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler signaled the seriousness of the crisis for the United States. How it will be resolved remains uncertain.
Though globalization may be blamed, trying to exclude foreign imports is unlikely. Costs would be very high and beyond all calculation. Effective global regulation and deliberate economic management is even more unlikely. Accordingly, global competition will probably continue to challenge established economic relationships—just as it has throughout the past, but now with unprecedented speed and force.
Culturally a similar competition arose as movies, then TV and recorded popular songs, began to influence human behavior and expectations. Hollywood blockbusters in from United States and Indian movies mostly produced in Mumbai (Bombay), achieved the widest circulation beyond national borders. When poor peasants and recent migrants living in urban slums encountered the wealth, luxury, and sexual display flaunted by movie stars and pop singers, discontent with their own harsh circumstances tended to intensify. Young people in particular often rebelled against the customs and norms their parents sought to transmit to them.
But as local customs and traditions were thus weakened, a powerful counter current of religious reaction arose, especially in Muslim lands, energetically aimed against the “Great Satan” of American popular culture. Terrorist attacks resulted, most notably the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York on September 11, 2001, whereupon the American government declared a “War on Terror” and invaded Afghanistan, thereby inaugurating hostilities that still continue in 2010.
Economic setback and the War on Terror thus join together to confront the American people and their government with unsolved problems that seem sure to persist for a long time. It therefore appears that globalization can hurt poor and rich alike, intensifying the pace of social change around the globe to or beyond the breaking point when ruthless violence takes over.
Bibliography:
- Bordo, M. D., Taylor, S. M., & Williamson, J. G. (Eds.). (2003). Globalization in historical perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- McNeill, J. R., & McNeill, W. H. (2003). The human web. New York: W. W. Norton.
- Mittleman, J. (2000). The globalization syndrome: Transformation and resistance. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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