Two thousand years ago, Europeans outnumbered stay-at home Africans for the first time, by 25 million to 17 million. There were another seven or so million people spread throughout the Americas - and a lesser number in Australia and elsewhere. A third of the world's population lived in India , and another quarter in China . The Romans thought all roads led to Rome , but three in every four people lived in Asia , and the Asians had a higher standard of living, too. China was industrially far in advance, mass-producing iron at levels not reached in the West for hundreds of years.
The world population grew little from the time of Ptolemy to the ninth-century Baghdad world map to the first global contraction of the 1490s. But if the overall population was static, individuals were increasingly mobile, trading in multicultural bazaars like Bantam, plying the, long-distance Indian Ocean maritime trade, and running overland caravans across the Sahara and along the Silk Road , which operated along its full length from 100 BC. Intrepid travelers like William of Rubruck (c.1220-93), Marco Polo (1254-1324) and Ibn Battuta (1304-68) - and no doubt many explorers coming from east to west whose names and exploits have been lost started to reconnect the disparate populations in Europe, North Africa and Asia.
Growing and increasingly interconnected populations became vulnerable to the destructive forces of warfare, famine and plague. The period 1200-1350 saw violence of unprecedented scale and violence between the nomadic Mongols and sedentary peoples of Persia and China , drawing in peoples from Hungary in the west to Korea in the east. Starvation was the frequent companion of the bloodshed in China. Famine also appeared on a continental scale in Europe , a result of climatic changes known as the Little Ice Age (1315-22), causing widespread crop failures. In 1337 France and England became embroiled in vicious provincial fighting (which was to continue sporadically for 116 years).
War and famine left city-dwellers, farmers and soldiers in no fit state to resist the plague that originated in central Asia and took root in China in the early 1330s. The Black Death spread west along both commercial and military routes, to Constantinople, Kaffa and Sicily (1347), through the Mediterranean countries (1348), reaching Mecca , Germany , Scandinavia and the British Isles in 1349 and from Russia to Yemen by 1351. The plague spread so fast because inter-regional migration was reaching new heights. In Europe , the pre-plague population of some 80 million was reduced in two years to 50 million. The European mortality over these years is estimated as being one third to one half; similar proportions probably apply to the Middle East, Asia and North Africa.
The overall impacts are complex. The Black Death increased serfdom, spread fatalism and limited international trade, but it also strengthened the hand of surviving peasants, increased labor mobility and made economies more reliant on money. The impacts varied regionally, but in human terms the European and Asian worlds in the 1350s were much smaller than they had been a few years before. Perhaps the experience of plague lay behind the medieval quest for luxury. One spice in particular, sugar, generated one of the darkest episodes in global mobility. Out of sweetness came forth slavery.
By 1500, the world population had recovered from the catastrophic losses of the Black Death and other plagues to reach nearly 440 million people. Two-thirds of the world's people remained in Asia, while the African population was catching up with Europe . But for those with global intent, the populous planet suffered from labor shortages, and slavery became the solution.
Slavery had been widespread in Greek and Roman times, and had continued in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia through to the tenth century. The victims were as likely to be Spaniards or Poles as Africans or Arabs. Lovejoy, P. in Transformations in Slavery(2000), argues that 2.2 million Africans were enslaved and shipped to Asia in the years between 650 and 1500 while another 4.3 million were transported across the Sahara.
In medieval Europe, Christian norms made enslaving other Christians morally unacceptable; serfdom was considered a pragmatic solution to labor shortages. During the first global contraction, however, the traditional distaste for enslaving one's own subjects crumbled. Columbus was comfortable with slavery his home port of Genoa was a major receiving point for slaves from the Black Sea . But when he asked the Spanish crown for permission to enslave some Caribbean natives, he was refused. When he ignored these orders and shipped slaves back to Spain in 1495, he was required to return and release them. But early colonists found an alternative to slavery: the infamous encomienda system of forced labor in exchange for religious instruction. By 1550, the merits of slavery were being widely promoted. Slavery would lead to religious conversion - an argument used to secure Papal blessing - while providing household servants, sex partners, miners, galley-rowers. Most of all, slaves would cater to the European sweet tooth.
Popular for thousands of years among Asian elites, sugar gradually migrated westwards to the Levant and Egypt. European crusaders developed a taste for sugar in the Holy Land, and its cultivation spread to Cyprus , Morocco , Andalusia , Sicily and the Algarve. The Portuguese took sugar to the recently settled islands of Madeira, the Canaries, Cape Verde and Sao Tome . Apart from their hotter and wetter climate, these Atlantic islands enjoyed a crucial advantage over the Mediterranean for growing sugar - they were close to Africa and away from prying eyes. Europeans rapidly discovered that sugar is back-breaking work. But if the Portuguese were going to use slaves, they wanted it out of sight and out of mind. The Atlantic islands were far enough away; Brazil even further. Between 1450 and 1600 the Portuguese shipped 175,000 slaves from West Africa, transforming what had been a series of regional slave markets into a transatlantic trade where the tickets were one-way.
The French pharmacist Nostradamus made one uncharacteristically clear prediction: there was a great future for sugar (Traite des Confitures, 1557). When the Doge of Venice entertained Henri III of France to dinner in 1572, every single item of the dinner service - cutlery, glasses, plates, chandeliers, the works - was confected from sugar. Within decades it was transformed from dazzling novelty into everyday commodity. Sweetened coffee and cocoa became the breakfast beverages that fuelled industrious European households and coffee shops provided the focal points for early stockbrokers.
By the late
eighteenth century, the population of Western Europe was around 100 million
and getting richer. To cope with spiraling demand for sugar, the Spanish,
English and French set up plantations in their Caribbean and Indian Ocean
colonies - St Domingo, Jamaica and Mauritius - while the Portuguese expanded
sugar plantations in Brazil. In 1700, world sugar production was around
60,000 tones, and by 1787 it reached 300,000 tones. Sugar, rum, and tobacco,
are commodities which are nowhere necessaries of life, noted Adam Smith
sourly, but “are become objects of almost universal consumption.”
The growth
of the sugar trade democratized luxury, but with it came a dangerous tolerance
for brutality in production. The Dutch spice traders had been considered
ruthless, but the scale and ethics of sugar and tobacco plantations were
at a different level. At least 11 million Africans were shipped to the
Americas as slaves from 1500 - greater than the combined populations of
Portugal , Spain and Britain at the time. The impact of this unparalleled
human transplantation was to shift the world's centre of gravity irrevocably,
with the French and British Caribbean receiving at least 3.8 million slaves,
Brazil 3.6 million, Spanish America 1.5 million and North America another
400,000. The surviving slaves made a huge contribution to the economic
vitality and social. diversity of the New World. Every tone of sugar consumed
in Europe came at the cost of one slave's life. (S.O'Connell, Sugar: The
Grass That Changed the World, 2004.)
In the eighteenth century, Britain 's maritime and commercial supremacy saw it become the leading slave nation, responsible for shipping over three million Africans to the Americas . The story of the abolition of slavery is often told as one of British moral leadership after what Niall Ferguson has called an 'astonishing volte-face' in the late eighteenth century.l72 Led by the Clapham Sect of abolitionists and a nationwide mass-movement against slavery, the trade was abolished by parliament in 1807, followed by the abolition of slavery altogether (1833). The British started shipping slaves back to West Africa and setting them free. After an abrupt switch in the national psyche, the British Empire became a progressive global force.
This account is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. The achievements of English Methodist and parliamentarian William Wilberforce (1759-1833) and fellow abolitionists are real enough. The Royal Navy captured hundreds of slave ships run by many other nations. But the idea of a rapid and profound change in national ethics is misleading. The reality is that most Europeans, North and South Americans only gradually and grudgingly accepted that slavery would have to be abolished. 'Slavery,' noted Edmund Burke, 'is a weed that grows on every soil.'
In the sixteenth century the English had criticized Spain for its enslavement of native Americans, and slave-owning had never become widespread within England. By the late eighteenth century, slavery was under fire again on both pragmatic and moral grounds. Adam Smith decried the 'dreadful misfortunes' that befell the native peoples of the Americas and East Indies as a result of growing links with Europe. Though he omitted Africa, like Turgot he disapproved,. of slavery, mainly because he believed it was inefficient. His fellow-Scot William Murray, Lord Mansfield, judging the case of an escaped slave in 1772, found slavery 'so odious, that nothing can ,be suffered to support it but positive law'. In Enlightenment Europe and the Americas , there was growing repugnance to slavery based on principles of natural rights which had been slowly developing after the pioneering work of Dominican friars in Spain described in the last chapter.
Wilberforce first raised the issue of slavery in parliament in 1789, and in 1791 his first bill to make slave-trading illegal was roundly defeated; in 1805 it was blocked in the House of Lords. Slavery had already been banned in Haiti and France before the 1807 British abolition of the trade. The British tolerated the existence of slave owning for a whole generation after banning the trade. Nearly two million more Africans were shipped to the Americas after the British abolition, suggesting the naval effort to stamp out the trade was far from comprehensive; a substantial part of the Royal Navy was on other duties like defending imports of opium into China . When a second movement for total abolition gathered steam in the early 1830s, plantation owners demanded - and received compensation of 2.6 billion USD in today's money from tax payers for the loss of their slaves. The move against slavery was slow and halting, as much driven by economics as morals.
The issue was equally murky elsewhere. From the 1820s the USA was literally split in two over the issue of abolition, down the demarcation line drawn up in the 1760s by English geographers Mason and Dixon . In France , planters convinced Napoleon to overturn the abolition and slavery returned until 1848. It continued unabated in Cuba and Brazil until the late 1880s, despite the enormous economic leverage that Britain and France could have exercised to stamp it out. Little was done to improve work conditions on the plantations after abolition, and sugar production in 1894 was actually two and a half times higher than it had been in 1787.
If Europeans
had genuinely switched against slaving, would they so quickly have devised
the barbaric system of 'indentured labor' to replace it? Using account
books instead of manacles, indenture trapped millions of Asian 'coolies'
in debt slavery from which they could not escape. As we will see, the
reliance on cheap sugar - as well as other plantation commodities like
tobacco, cotton, tea, rubber, cocoa and coffee created an ethical callousness
on the part of consumers towards distant producers that continued long
after the abolition of slavery. (Anthony Wild, Black Gold: The Dark History
of Coffee, 2005.)
In 1820, the
world population was one billion. By the eve of the Great War in 1913,
it stood at 1.8 billion. Over 100 years, 100 million people - African,
Asian, European, American migrated to all corners of the planet. It was
an unparalleled experience directly affecting one person in ten around
the globe. Never before had there been such an exchange of goods, culture,
religion and genes. Historians tend to capitalize this period as 'The Great
Migration' not just because of its scale but because of its supposedly
universal benefits. But there were many losers from global migration.
When Pedro Alvares Cabral was dispatched to India in early 1500, he took with him from Portugal a force of 1,200 men. The Chinese fleets that roamed the oceans in the early fifteenth century had up to 30,000 people aboard. In the first global contraction, people with global intent moved across the world in thousands, but most intended to return home. In the early modern period, millions of Africans were permanently uprooted, and hundreds of thousands of Europeans ventured to the new colonies - where life expectancy was short but financial rewards were great for the survivors.
In the seventeenth century, 700,000 English people emigrated, mainly to North America and the Caribbean, with 50,000 more each decade through the whole eighteenth century. Over a million Germans and Swiss went to North America and the West Indies between 1689 and 1815. When French colonial boosters proposed a utopian settlement at Kourou in Guyana in 1763, 17,000 would-be emigrants rapidly assembled at Atlantic ports. Of the 13,000 who set sail, 9,000 died in Guyana.
But the nineteenth century saw a one-way global migration that dwarfed all previous movements of people. Over 25 million Europeans migrated, especially after steamships slashed the cost of a one-way third-class berth. The main destination was the United States, but they also left for Argentina, Brazil , Australia , New Zealand and many other destinations across the entire globe. Many migrants were those on the economic periphery, looking for better opportunities. In 1820, the USA already had a slightly higher average standard of living than most European countries, and by 1870, the US had become even more alluring for all except Dutch, Belgian and British workers.
Emigrants were pushed as much as pulled. As European states became more powerful and sensitive to the risk of revolution, they actively created a stream of political migrants. Many were indentured laborers or convicts, while others were religious or political refugees, especially after the failed rebellions and desperate famine of 1848-51. It was in this period that the passport, previously a privilege grant~ by the Persian court, the Indian village headman and the odd European monarch, began to be used by paranoid states as a way of controlling the movements of subversives. 'The creation of the modern passport system', writes John Torpey signaled the dawn of a new era in human affairs, in which individual states and the international state system as a whole successfully monopolized the legitimate authority to permit movement within and across their jurisdictions. (Torpey, The Invention of the Passport, 1999, p. 9.)
Until 1858, British passports had been issued only in French, the diplomatic language, but after this point, a British passport - in English and French - could no longer be issued to foreigners. The passport became for the first time a proof of national identity. The UK was the largest source of European migrants, exporting around two million people per decade from 1870 to the 1920s. Almost half of the 12 million UK emigrants from 1820-1913 were Irish, fleeing the effects of famine from the mid-century. Millions more were impoverished Scottish and Welsh. The Italians and Germans also migrated in large numbers. The rate of emigration was highest in countries like Sweden: one in a hundred people left every year. Sparsely populated France was a rare European recipient of migrants in this period.
Despite the migration, periodic wars and disastrous cholera epidemics, the population in Europe continued to rise rapidly, doubling from 82 million in 1700 to 165 million by the rebellious year of 1848 and topping 230 million by the end of the century. For those who remained, another migration was also underway, from countryside to the burgeoning cities when industrialization gathered pace. In the early 1880s, 44 per cent of the British workforce was employed in industry; in Germany it was already over a third. Urbanization and a declining agricultural workforce enabled or necessitated greater dependency on food imports, creating a further cycle of industrialization.
Despite growing incomes, work conditions were notoriously bad in the new cities. Liverpool sugar refiners were forced to recruit hundreds of Germans because locals would not accept suffocating conditions that were known to lead to early death. In London , Henry Mayhew, editor of the humorous magazine Punch, wrote four distinctly unfunny volumes about London Labour and the London Poor (1851-61). Mayhew exposed in lurid detail the extremes of poverty among an underclass of 30,000 street vendors, laborers, prostitutes and criminals in the Empire's capital. The London streets were at the centre of a global trade network, with thirty boys specializing in gutta-percha, and tea, sugar and spice stolen from the docks being 'things in excellent demand'.
I can't make it out how it is, one man told Mayhew, but I remember that I could go out and sell twelve bushel of fruit in a day, when sugar was dear, and now, when sugar's cheap, I can't sell three bushel on the same round. Perhaps we want thinning, he added - an ominous echo of Thomas Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Efforts to tame the impacts of industrialization, like the 1833 Factory Act in Britain banning the employment of children under nine, and later legislation in France banning under-fives (1841), were part of the same cautious and contested reforming trend as the abolition of slavery. Sixty-hour weeks in harsh conditions remained the norm for older children and adults through the nineteenth century. For those who could afford it, emigration to less industrialized lands was an attractive proposition. Despite the bucolic dreams of many immigrants, especially from Eastern Europe, they found themselves sucked into urban industries, notably Chicago 's Packingtown and Pittsburgh 's iron and steel foundries. Driven by poverty and politics as much as aspiration, European emigration nevertheless raised living standards all round. (Kevin O'Rourke, The Era of Migration: Lessons for today, Centre for Economic Policy Research Paper DP4498, July 2004.)
From 1870 to 1913, average incomes in Western Europe almost doubled; in the receiving countries of North America, Australia , New Zealand and Latin America , incomes more than doubled. Elsewhere, however, this period of migration was far from great. In Africa and Asia, the standard of living was stagnant. In terms of numbers, destinations and distances, the Asian global diaspora was the most dramatic. From 1834 to 1937, 30 million Indians dispersed right across the British Empire, from Australia and Malaysia to Mauritius and the Caribbean. Another 12 million migrants left China for South-East Asia, South Africa , Cuba and the USA . The motivations of these migrants are explained by the fact that incomes in India and China had fallen in real terms between 1700 and 1870.
The creation of railways and canals also relied on immigrant labour. The Suez Canal opened in 1869 at the cost of an estimated 125,000 Egyptian lives. Fearing the threat to its established routes to India, the canal was vehemently opposed by the British - until they grabbed an opportunity to buy out the Egyptian half-share from a heavily-indebted Isma'il Pasha in 1875 for a knock-down price.
The global commodity trade pushed these countries backwards economically; the global trade in muscle pulled them apart socially. Some Asian indentured laborers managed to send money home, and some even returned home themselves. But for the most part, the Asian migration, like the European, was irreversible.
Few places were untouched by the migrations. One was Tierra del Fueg, where living standards were so primitive that a shocked Charles Darwin, visiting on the Beagle in 1832, began to devise a theory of evolving civilization. 'Whilst observing the barbarous inhabitants it struck me that the possession of some property, a fixed abode, and the union of many families under a chief, were the indispensable requisites for civilization. Such habits almost necessitate the cultivation of the ground, Darwin mused in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), before concluding that “The problem, however, of the first advance of slaves towards civilization is at present much too difficult to be solved.”
Darwin himself was vehemently against slavery, but his most troublesome legacy was 'Social Darwinism', developed by followers like Francis Galton. Although slavery had been largely abolished, the belief that human groups ('races') were evolving at different speeds - even in different directions - led to the renaissance of the concept of the savage. This had devastating consequences for Africa . From an already depleted population of some 70 million in 1800, five and a half million more Africans were enslaved in the nineteenth century, with 3.3 million going to the Americas . By 1870, Europeans outnumbered Africans two to one; were five times as wealthy; and were hundreds of times better armed. Slaving had weakened Africa 's economies and societies, but it was only after the abolition of slavery that Europeans developed a strong racist superiority complex.
Coupled with rising strategic and commercial tensions, this led to the Scramble for Africa , the period from 1884 when Europeans raced each other to annex African territory at an astonishing rate. The Scramble was not just military, but commercial and religious, and was facilitated by European superiority in weaponry, transport and communications. By 1913, Britain had nearly 30 per cent of Africa's population under its control, France 15 per cent, Germany a tenth, and Belgium another seven per cent.
The great migration brought precipitous declines in native populations. Indigenous peoples had already been devastated by the unintended result of introduced diseases (as in the 1520 smallpox epidemic in Mexico), or brutally harsh treatment (as in the seventeenth-century Bolivian silver mines). In Mexico the pre-conquest population of five to ten million was just 1.6 million in 1618. In the future United States , the native population shrank from two million in 1500 e-v 750,000 in 1700 and just 325,000 in 1830.
In the late nineteenth century, however, colonization was accompanied by systematic attempts at extermination, as in Van Diemen's Land where the very last inhabitant died in 1876, or the 1904 German campaign against Herero herdsmen in Namibia . In the US , the native American population fell by half between 1850 and 1890 as land-hungry settlers and railroad builders lobbied government to restrict the survivors to reserves. There was also a marked hardening of attitudes in India after the Mutiny and Rebellion of 1857.
Then in 1889, eleven European powers and several others, including the emperor of the Ottomans, signed a British-initiated anti-slavery convention. And as Diane Robinson-Dunn recently described in The harem, slavery and British imperial culture(2006), her Majesty's officers were motivated by the belief in the essential immorality of slavery, a belief which had become a part of English society and culture through the work of anti-slavery activists even before this specific campaign. (Robinson-Dunn, 2006, p.197.)
By the same token, “as the idea of imperial greatness was based on both a duty to reform and a certain amount of respect and admiration for occupied peoples, the British officer could call himself a pasha while working to undermine the existing power structures in Egypt, and see no contradiction.” (Robinson-Dunn, 2006, p.207.)
But even the humble bicycle, as much as the steamship, refrigerated railroad and telegraph, was central to assimilating the population upheavals of the great migration. It was a bridge between the global contraction of the 1880s and modern globalization. In the 1890s, Frank Bowden's Raleigh Company in Nottingham was churning out 30,000 bicycles a year. The proliferation of easy-to-ride bicycles like the Rover enabled workers to get to factories, farmers to markets, urban socialists to bond with each other, women to throw off their corsets. The bicycle facilitated the globe-trotting exploits of Phileas Fogg and created the oldest international sporting fixture: the Tour de France (1903).
Crucially, it ended the social isolation of remote communities, enabling an unprecedented degree of genetic mixing. In effect, says geneticist Steve Jones of University College London, the bike slowed the pace of natural selection. (BBC/Open University, http://www.open2.net/truthwillout/ evolution/article/evolution-iones.htm.)
Some epidemiologists and geneticists disagree, citing HIV as an example of a disease which still exerts formidable selective pressure on people, especially in the developing world. And for all its benefits, one innovation in bicycling comfort and safety - the pneumatic tire invented by Dunlop in 1888 relied on the most brutal abuse of human labor ever recorded: wild rubber tapping.
But no doubt, the global contraction of the 1880’s and 90’s was notable for the dramatic rates of economic growth in Europe and the Americas , enabled by unparalleled labor migration and the surging demand for commodities. But this contraction also saw the emergence of a liberal movement increasingly critical of the violence and exploitation lying not far beneath the surface of the late nineteenth-century global system. Facilitated by telegraph and newspapers, eyewitness accounts of European battlefields, New York sweatshops and colonial plantations led to widespread calls for a more responsible model of trade and diplomacy centered around new global institutions.
Have religions
added to globalization, of course they did, and that is why (including
New Religious Movement’s, MNRs), related subjects are covered on this
website. A most dramatic example of course were the twelfth- to fourteenth-century
Crusades, including Islamic terrorism today.
Another example
of a less aggressive but nevertheless persuasive behavior is documented
in article published last year. Here Rebecca Overmyer-Velazquez explored
the competing dualism and the collision of two cosmologies, Spanish Christianity
and Aztec. But as she explains, this process didn't add up to a final syncretic
union of the Nahua and the Christian. (Christian Morality in New Spain,
in Ballantyne and Burton , eds., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial
Encounters in World History, Duke University Press, 2005, p.81.)
Overmyer-Velazquez used as the source for her article vol.10 of the Florentine Codex, a compilation of historical and ethnographic information about the Aztecs assembled by the Pranciscan Bernadino de Sahagun. Produced at the behest of the officials of his order, the Codex reflects the attempts of the colonizing Catholic Church to gather knowledge about the peoples whom it hoped to convert.
Elsewhere of course there were also Montesinos and Las Casas, whose forcing, conversions took on planetary implications in a world formally divided between European powers.
Before, widespread
participation in spiritual debate and geographical exploration was severely
limited prior to the commercialization of printing by Johannes Gutenberg
(c.1400-1468). A bible took 20 years to transcribe and few could afford
them outside princely and religious elites. So when Gutenberg exhibited
a two-volume printed bible at the 1455 Frankfurt Book Fair, the significance
of printing was immediately clear. Printing presses spread rapidly across
Europe, to Italy (1465), France (1470), Spain (1472) and England (1475).
Mexico City had its first press by 1533; the press arrived in Cambridge
Massachusetts in 1638.
In 1494, Italian
humanist Aldus Manutius started to introduce affordable half-sized books,
in print-runs of 1,000 and with a compact new Italic typeface. Printing
began slowly to democratize literacy and learning around the world. Similar
impacts must have occurred in China and Korea, where printing had developed
much earlier, although the results were more muted because of the high
costs of printing such complex alphabets. Initially, printing in Europe
served to standardize written Latin and assisted its role as a universal
language, but as publishers began to publish Dante and other early renaissance
writers, the printed book began to weaken the primacy of Latin and led
to the flourishing of European vernacular languages. On the other hand,
from the 1480s religious fundamentalists like Tomas Torquemada reacted
to the proliferation of non-Catholic literature, especially Jewish Talmuds
and Arabic texts, by orchestrating public burnings.
The effect of commerce is riches; the consequence of riches, luxury, wrote Montesquieu (1689-1755), and that of luxury the perfection of arts. Printing and the increased trade in luxuries certainly helped spread the humanist ideas of the Italian Renaissance across Northern Europe - and to pass Northern innovations in music southwards. Yet the Renaissance defies any effort to pin it down chronologically, nor can it plausibly be described as a global movement. The exchange of ideas did speed up in the late fifteenth century, but a truly global contraction in ideas was building in the next three centuries.
Enlightenment thinking gathered force in Europe in the 1750s, but this was far from being an era of 'godless' liberal capitalism. Indeed, the nineteenth century was a period of 'triumphal re-emergence and expansion' of world religions, under the aegis of supposedly secular trends - imperialism, trade and labour migration. (For previous see Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-19, 2004.)
The great religions - Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism - retrenched for global expansion, while a number of smaller faiths like Baha'i also extended their scope worldwide. The world religions streamlined their bureaucracies, formalized their doctrines and exploited mass printing, cheap and secure long-distance travel and new building technologies to increase their global reach. Pilgrimages to Benares, Santiago, Guadeloupe, Lhasa and Mecca were an important motive for international travel, as was the spectacular Muslim expansion into Africa, beginning in 1800, and later Christian missions in Africa, Asia, the Pacific and South America. Missionaries were treated with real hostility by East India Company officials because of their propensity to stir up unrest, but the Company failed to stem the numbers of missionaries. By the late nineteenth century, there were an estimated 100,000 Christian missionaries in Africa , and many more Islamic ones.
Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville identified religion as part of the key to the vibrancy of US society in his Democracy in America (1835-40). He believed that 'Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages'. In the USA , African-Americans built up Baptist and other churches as part of a drive for emancipation, appropriating Scottish Presbyterian slave-owners' church music to suit their spiritual and cultural needs. In 1893, a World Parliament of Religions was convened in Chicago, with the goal of stemming religious conflict. Perhaps it is not surprising that it was less successful than the Meridian Conference convened a decade before. The power of differing religions as world forces was picked up by Max Weber's theory of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1904-5. (Weber was not translated into English until 1930.)
Religious expansion and colonialism impacted on the diversity of languages in unexpected ways. Languages were going extinct well before the modern phase of globalization - a result first of the decimation of native peoples by conquest and disease, and then as nation-builders persecuted minority languages in the name of national assimilation. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, linguistic experts like East Indian Company official William Jones and the German Sanskrit expert Franz Bopp had made great strides in understanding the common roots of European, Persian and Indian languages. (This has been discussed in detail already elsewhere on this website.)
In the late nineteenth century, both European and non-European languages like Hindi, Urdu, Swahili, Bisla-ma and Malay were grammatically codified and became more uniform, at the cost of local dialects. Meanwhile, new hybrid languages like Creole and Pidgin came into existence, and some missionaries began to document the languages of remote peoples in an effort to assist conversion. This period also saw high-minded efforts to create universal languages. Lazar Zamenhof's Esperanto (1887) is the best-known, and a more recent proposal is Mondlango (2002).
From the eighteenth century, European enthusiasts also began to assemble important collections of art and artifacts from around the world. More Europeans went to Asia than vice versa, and many were fascinated with what they saw. Physician Hans Sloane (1660-1753) assembled an impressive collection that on his death laid the foundations for the British Museum. The acquisition of sculptures from the Parthenon in the early 1800s by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin inaugurated a period of intense competition between European nations to assemble national art collections. Napoleon and his generals were ruthlessly acquisitive in stocking the Louvre, the royal palace that reopened as a public museum in 1793. Europeans were not always driven by aesthetic mission, however - the British deliberately destroyed the Chinese Imperial summer palace in 1860.
The nineteenth-century 'Scramble for Artworks' was exemplified by the acquisition of the Venus de Milo. Unearthed by a gardener on the Mediterranean island of Milos in 1820, the statue became the object of an unseemly transaction between disgruntled islanders, Turkish bureaucrats and a French naval officer seeking to curry favour. Legend has it that the statue lost its arm in a scuffle on the Milos dockside. That the Venus is today one of the most globally recognizable artworks owes much to boosting by French connoisseurs. After France was forced to return the purloined Medici Venus to Italy in 1815, curators sought to elevate the status of the Venus de Milo as a replacement, suppressing evidence that the sculpture was by an unknown Antiochan, Alexandos. Instead they claimed it to be a work of the great Praxiteles. (See Gregory Curtis, Disarmed: the story of Venus de Milo, 2005.)
In this period, painting, sculpture and music were all pressed into the service of nation-building, epitomized by a proliferation of larger than life equestrian statues and triumphal canvases.
In this period, painting, sculpture and music were all pressed into the service of nation-building, epitomized by a proliferation of larger than life equestrian statues and triumphal canvases. A US national art collection was unveiled at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1872, and art museums followed in capitals around the world, from Hanoi and Cairo to Bogota. New art forms were more easily exchanged internationally. First the novel (eighteenth century), then photography (1830s) and finally impressionist (1870s) and abstract art (1900s) were admired, copied and hybridized around the world. 'A century which began with the Spanish painter Francisco Goya's lurid nightmares of war and revolution, ended with Japanese sculptors modifying the style of the French master Auguste Rodin, while Indian modernists borrowed Japanese techniques of colour and brushwork. (Bayly, 2004, p.366.)
Commercial printmaking enabled the proliferation of copies of artworks: this was the period when the Mona Lisa became a global icon. Literature also became far more accessible with the introduction of the Universal Bibiothek paperback series in Leipzig in the 1860s. It spawned numerous imitations, culminating in the Penguin paperback series launched by Allen Lane in 1935.
Meanwhile, a broader urban culture was also developing, associated with a whole range of new opportunities for sociable cultural exchange: cafes and public houses; shopping streets, department stores and offices; museums and libraries; places of worship, music halls and sports grounds. Commerce, creativity and philanthropy combined to drive these developments. Architectural innovations also underpinned this increasingly homogenous urban cultural infrastructure, notably the invention of Portland cement (1824) and the rolled steel joist. Architecture, commerce and culture came together in the World Fairs, beginning in 1851 in London , and circulating around European and US cities every few years thereafter. In 1893, some 27 million people visited the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. (Maurice Roche, Mega-events: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture, 2000.)
The World Fairs were competitive opportunities to showcase national cultural and technology, wanted to use it to record people's dying words or to announce clock time. For twenty years he steadfastly refused to allow its use for playing music. Without the dogged determination and downright egotism of men like Cyrus Field, Theodore Judah and William Randolph Hearst, the commercialization of the telegraph, railroad and popular press could have taken decades longer. Global communication also relied on influential early adopters: Queen Victoria was an enthusiastic telegraph 'geek' who checked her in-box daily and sent a 17-hour birthday greeting to US President McKinley. (Cookson Gillian, The Cable: The Wire That Changed the World, Tempus, 2003.)
Many people actively resisted the spread of this global communications infrastructure, from the saboteurs of transatlantic cable-laying and the destructive competitiveness of rival railroad laying teams, to the efforts of telegraph companies to kill the telephone and resistance of naval officers to the introduction of ship-to-shore radio. The self-confident white bureaucrats in the Indian Civil Service often ignored telegraphic instructions from Whitehall. It took about 50 years for the package of technologies to finally become global. In July 1903, US President Theodore Roosevelt wished 'a happy Independence Day to the US , its territories and properties'. It took nine minutes for the message to travel by telegraph from San Francisco to Honolulu, to Midway, Guam, Manila , China and westwards.
One episode in particular captures the unexpected pathways of global exchange in this period. In 1892, US President William McKinley (1843-1901) wanted to sound out Cuban revolutionary leader Calixto Ifiigues Garcia about helping topple the Spanish in Cuba . The rebel leader was hiding out in mountainous jungles so the new-fangled telegraph was no use. If the Spanish caught the messenger, they would kill him without compunction. Even if the messenger evaded the Spanish, his safe reception by the notoriously hot-heated Garcia was far from certain. To make matters worse, US public opinion was sharply divided on the prospect of a Spanish adventure. 'War with Spain would increase the business and earnings of every American railroad', urged Senator John M. Thurston of Nebraska , 'it would increase the output of every American factory, it would stimulate every branch of industry and domestic commerce'. But Mark Twain and many others were vociferous pacifists and non-interventionists. 'Where can I find a man who will carry a message to Garcia?' McKinley asked his head of military intelligence. 'There's a fellow by the name of Rowan will find Garcia for you, if anybody can', responded Colonel Arthur Wagner. 'Send him!' barked the President. Getting the message to Garcia was an epic adventure that made first lieutenant Andrew S. Rowan, graduate of West Point , a hero. Without asking any questions, he braved his way by boat, foot and horseback to the rebel camp, delivered his message, and found his way back safely. It was a small world if you were determined enough. (See also Lincoln Cushing , Centennial of the Spanish-American War 1898-1998, http://www.zpub.com/cpp/saw.html. acc 'How I Carried the Message To Garcia', Colonel Andrew Summers Rowan, http://www.foundationsmag.com/rowan.html.)
The 'yellow journalism' of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer about Spanish atrocities and noble Cuban rebels embroiled the US in further interventions, paving the way for the Panama Canal, the blatant acquisition of Puerto Rico and Guam, and a 16-year period of bloody occupation in the Philippines. A probably apocryphal story has Hearst sending a telegram to illustrator Frederic Remington: 'You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war'. Rowan's adventure became a worldwide bestseller, not through the New York press barons, but by an obscure publication out of Aurora, NY.
The Roycroft Press was run by Elbert Hubbard, an ex-soapsalesman from Buffalo who was influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement of John Ruskin and William Morris. It put reprinted in hundreds of magazines and newspapers. The director of the Russian railways, visiting Daniels in the US , decided to translate A Message into Russian and give a copy to every Russian railway worker. Lenin must have been furious. His monumental Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) had a print-run of 2,400.
A Message spread from Russia to Germany, France, Spain, Turkey, India and China . During the Russo-Japanese war (1904-05), Russian troops were given a copy on the way to the front. The Japanese found the booklet on Russian prisoners and concluded it must be a good thing. It was translated and given to every Japanese soldier and civil servant. The Japanese victory in 1905 owed much to their openness to new ideas, and sent shock waves around the world, marking a resurgence of Asian confidence that Europe was not invincible. In remote Indian villages, babies were named after Japanese generals. All in all, some 40 million copies of A Message To Garda were printed and distributed. (Its value as motivational literature may be more limited today than it was 100 years ago. 'My manager at work gave the Message to Garcia to all his employees a few years ago,' wrote an anonymous reviewer on amazon.com. “As soon as I finished reading it, I decided to start looking for another job.”)
A Message captures some of the complexity of cultural exchange on a shrinking planet: the importance of the individual in geopolitics; the sabre-rattling power of the popular media; the unpredictable transmission of cultural fashion; the limitations of technology. And what was Garcia's reply to McKinley's message? Far from welcoming US intervention with open arms, Garcia dispatched three trusted emissaries to Washington to test the water. Global exchange is a two-way process.
In 1928, Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade wrote his Cannibal's Manifesto (1928), urging Brazilian artists to draw their inspiration from around the world. The balance between home-grown culture and global cannibalism see-sawed through the inter-war period. In many ways it was a period of 'Phoney Globalization'. Josephine Baker, the exotic dancer from St. Louis, Missouri, vied with Parisian-born singer Edith Piaf for the limelight in Paris before and during the Second World War. International sport became the expression of geopolitical conflict in the 1930s. The Nobel prizes in literature stayed mainly in Europe but some token efforts were made to embrace other literary traditions. The prize went to Bengali Rabindrath Tagore (1913), to a clutch of Americans in the 1930s, and to Gabriela Mistral of Chile in 1945.
This period was a mixed one in world religion, marked by both secularism and growing evangelism. In Turkey , for example, modernizer Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk (1881-1938) abolished the 1,300-year-old Islamic caliph ate in 1924 and established a clear separation between mosque and state. But the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Cairo in 1928. In this same period, Protestant churches in the USA began to debate in earnest the challenges of modernity, and especially the implications of Darwin 's theory of natural selection, inspired by a series of books published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles called The Fundamentals.
Cultural tension was also evident in early cinema, with the parochial (Edwin Porter's Great Train Robbery, 1903) vying with the nationalistic (D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, 1915) and the extraterrestrial (Georges Melies' Le Voyage dans la Lune, 1902). By the 1920s, the US and European film industries were borrowing extensively from each other - both themes and people. At the same time, European regulators made efforts to combat the influence of Hollywood - both because of its depravity and out of jealousy. (John Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920-1950, 2002.)
Hybridization reached its climax with Steamboat Willie, the 1928 sound cartoon featuring Mickey Mouse, parodying Buster Keaton, and using technology pioneered by Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer the previous year. But paradoxically, the 'Golden Age' of 1930s cinema was distinctly unglobal, because the introduction of soundtracks imposed linguistic constraints. In the 1940s, this divide between English-speaking and other cinematic traditions was enshrined when the Oscars introduced a special award for foreign-language films.
The literary genre of the nightmarish world state first appeared in this period, beginning with Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1920) and H. G. Wells' Men Like Gods (1923), and continuing with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945). Film on the other hand was shamelessly appropriated to serve nation-building and international propaganda. In 1936, George Marshall directed an unashamedly patriotic movie version of A Message to Garcia, and in 1939 the British celebrated empire with The Four Feathers. Leni Riefenstahl won a gold medal at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris for her fascist documentary The Triumph of the Will. Fascists regimes also responded to 'degenerate' art and literature by burning it. The mass movements and disruptions of the Second World War smoothed the way not just for trade and finance, but for a less propagandist, more popular and creative era of ideological exchange. (Tragically, it also saw the return of art theft under the Nazis.)
A package of artistic and technical innovations in the early 1950s opened up a new phase of cultural exchange. The roots of rock 'n' roll, portable radio and electronic television can all be traced back to the 1920s or earlier. But television sets cost about a year's wages in the 1930s and there was little demand for portable radios. The following for rhythm and blues was strictly and racially limited until Bill Haley's Rock around the Clock (1954). The development of the cheap pocket transistor radio in 1954 came at just the right time for teenagers. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Rebel without a Cause (1955) expressed teenage angst, but the simultaneous arrival of network TV, pocket radio and rock 'n' roll facilitated a more positive expression of teenage cultural exuberance, at least in the West. Each decade since then has seen extensions of - but not radical departures from - this 1950s cultural package, like the compact audiocassette (1963), Walkman (1979), MTV (1981), mainstream hip-hop (1980s), mobile phone text-message (1992) and iPod (2001).
The interplay between global and local culture was evident in the Eurovision song contest. From its origins in Monaco as a seven-country competition in 1956, it appeared at first glance to be quintessentially globalizing. But the contest developed strong anti-global undercurrents. Organizers insisted on the use of 'national' language from 1966 to 1972. Over the years, songs were sung in Lithuanian, Alpine, Romansch, Breton and Corsican languages and dialects, as political statements. On contest night in April 1968, these tensions came to a head at the Royal Albert Hall. Austria 's entrant was Karel Gott from Czechoslovakia ; and Germany was represented by Norwegian Wencke Myhre. Spain 's original entrant Juan Manuel Serrat wanted to sing in Catalan but was forbidden by dictator Francisco Franco. He was replaced by the more photogenic Massiel, who cost British crooner Cliff Richard victory after Germany - still smarting after their defeat by England in the football World Cup two years previously - gave their points to Spain.
From the 1960s, cultural cannibalism took off in the developing world, too. In Brazil , this was epitomized by Gilberto Gil's song Chuckberry Fields Forever, which mixed The Beades and Chuck Berry with Afro-Brazilian beats into the uniquely Brazilian style of troPicalismo. Other examples of this hybridization process in the field of popular music ranged from Jamaican reggae to Senegalese griot. (Charles & Dunn Perrone, Christopher Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization, 2002.)
In film, a mould-breaking contribution was For a Fistful of Dollars (made 1964, released 1967), Italian director Sergio Leone's great Western. An anonymous gunslinger rides into a lawless and dusty frontier town on a mule. San Miguel is being torn apart by the bloody rivalry of two gangs, the Baxters and the Rojos, fighting to win a monopoly on the trade in guns and liquor. 'There's money to be made in a place like this', muses the Man with No Name. He ruthlessly plays the two gangs off against each other, getting rich and restoring order to the town into the bargain.
For a Fistful
of Dollars is a sombre tale of crony capitalism, shady multinationals,
culture clashes, intellectual property piracy, fake branding and labour
exploitation. It's also about creative destruction, amazing technical innovation,
huge profits and sheer exhilaration. It was the very essence of 1960s globalization.
And that was just the making of the movie. Originally tided The Magnificent
Stranger, it was basically a rip-off of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's
1961 samurai film Yojimboo Indeed its US release was delayed three years
while Kurosawa sued Leone for breach of copyright - successfully.
Dozens of 'spaghetti
westerns' had already been made by Italians but failed to attract audiences
outside Italy . So it was dressed up as an 'authentic Western', with dozens
of European actors and crew adopting American names on the credits. Sergio
Leone styled himself 'Bob Robertson', Ennio Morricone was 'Dan Savio',
and Mario Brega - a major leap of the imagination this one - became 'Richard
Stuyvesant'. Per Un Pugno di Dollari - as it was called on its first Italian
release was mainly filmed in and around Los Albaricoques in the Southern
Spanish region of Almeria . Dry and dusty, the region bears a striking
resemblance to the American West - far more than any location in Italy.
Today it is a major tourist attraction for film-lovers, with several theme
parks based on 1960s film-sets.
For a Fistful of Dollars was a sweatshop. Clint Eastwood had to buy his own black jeans and received just US$15,000 (about US$80,000 in today's prices). He only agreed to the project because he recognized the plot from Yojimbo, which he had seen and liked. 'Over I went, taking the poncho with me - yeah the cape was my idea'. He had to wear the same unwashed poncho throughout the trilogy of Man with No Name films. Leone used dazzling electric arc lights over and above the harsh Almeria sun to give Clint his trademark squint. The set was a linguistic Tower of Babel . Each actor spoke his or her native tongue, with only the stuntman Benito Stefanelli able to act as informal interpreter between Leone and Eastwood. The unintended side effect of the dubbing is that the taciturn Man with No Name emerges as the only plain-talking character in a town of rogues. The film's score launched Ennio Morricone's international career, but he got the job mainly because he had been in the same class as Leone at school.
When it appeared in the US , the film was unpopular with US critics. Leone had broken Hollywood 's unwritten rules for Westerns: stylized violence, stereotyped 'Indians', the hero playing guitar by a campfire. But audiences loved it. For a Fistful of Dollars touched a raw nerve in its reframing of the frontier myth as a tale of cynicism, greed and violence. According to Leone's biographer Christopher Frayling, early viewers responded to the film because of disenchantment driven by the assassination of Kennedy and military escalation in Vietnam. In the early 1970s, ABC made a misguided effort to blur the mercenary tone of the film by adding a prologue. The original film went on to influence Hong Kong martial arts movies and Westerns right through to the recent Deadwood.
By the end of the 1960s, cultural exchanges had become markedly more global. But the hand of the corporation was becoming clearly visible. When the clean-cut New Seekers wanted to 'teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony' (1971), they were adapting a song that had first been written for a Coca-Cola advertisement. ('The "Hilltop" Ad: The Story of a Commercial', Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ccmphtml/colaadv.html)
In the mid-1990s, Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid ran a series of surveys asking people around the world about their artistic preferences. The surveys, conducted under the auspices of New York 's Dia Center for the Arts and funded by Chase Manhattan Bank, showed that people from 14 different countries had surprisingly similar tastes in painting. Most people, it transpired, liked the colour blue and preferred their paintings to be 'dishwasher-sized'. Komar and Melamid painted interpretations of what people said they most and least wanted.
The result caused uproar. Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker claimed it showed evidence of the existence of genetically-programmed universal artistic tastes. Others saw the whole exercise as an elaborate and subversive practical joke. To Michael Govan, director of the Dia Center , Komar and Melamid's project posed 'relevant questions that an artinterested public, and society in general often fail to ask: What would art look like if it were to please the greatest number of people? Or conversely: What kind of culture is produced by a society that lives and governs itself by opinion polls. (Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, 2002, p. 408-409.)
After the three global contractions of the 1490s, 1880’s and 1950’s, the globe remains highly diverse. There is no 'most wanted' painting, literature, movie genre, music or airline, let alone religious belief, cultural norm or political ideology. The world's 200 plus countries hold over 5,000 ethnic groups speaking nearly 7,000 languages. In two-thirds of those countries, at least one significant ethnic minority makes up ten per cent or more of the total population. Can this diversity last in the face of the fourth great contraction?
Persecution of diversity is a persistent and perhaps growing problem, with some 360 million people suffering exclusion as a result of religious beliefs, according to the Minorities at Risk database at the University of Maryland 's Centre for International Development and Conflict Management. Religion, culture and poverty often go hand in hand. Altogether 890 million people experience cultural, economic or political exclusion - and for around half of these, according to researchers, the exclusion has its roots in historic neglect. In Iran, for example, the 300,000 strong Baha'i community are considered non-persons in the constitution. Cultural exclusion can be a matter of life or death: the Dalit population of Nepal lives 20 years less than the average Nepalese - a scandalous gap. Global media helps highlight these injustices, and to some Canada can still speak Nuuchahnulth, while in north Australia, Patrick Nudjulu is one of just three remaining speakers of Mati Ke. One of the other speakers lives far off, and the other is Patrick's sister, but aboriginal tradition forbids siblings from speaking to each other after puberty. Languages are vanishing at the rate of one a fortnight. (Mark Abley, Spoken Here: Travel Among Threatened Languages, 2005.)
Of an estimated 14,500 languages that existed in the 1490’s, the number had fallen to 10,000 by the early nineteenth century, and 7,500 by 1900. Today there are around 6,900 living languages, according to the linguistic database Ethnologue. This database is run by SIL International- formerly the Summer Institute of Linguistics, which like other religious missions did much to homogenize language around the world in the quest for conversions. Experts predict the number of languages in the world will fall by 50-90 per cent over the next 100 years.
In thirty African countries, most people don't speak the official language and seven children out of eight are not taught in their mother tongue. In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union , one in four children studies in a foreign language. (Raymond Gordon, Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 15th edition, SIL, 2005.)
Learning is more difficult if it is not in the mother tongue. But defenders of global language argue that ability to speak one of the world's main languages enhances economic and cultural opportunities. Global languages are in a constant state of flux, and are highly adaptable to local needs. The internet can also facilitate the revival of languages such as Occitan and Welsh by joining up geographically dispersed speakers.
Global exchange of culture was severely limited prior to the lifting of the immensely destructive Cultural Revolution in China in the mid-1970s and the opening up ('glasnost') of the Soviet Union from 1985. In the 1980s and nineties, world trade in cultural goods (printed matter, literature, music, visual arts, cinema, photography, radio, television, games and sporting goods) almost quadrupled, to an estimated $390 billion. But the globalization of culture remained a limited process, with a few major players and many non-participants. In 1990, Japan, USA , Germany and UK exported over half of all cultural goods; those countries and France accounted for half of all imports. By the late 1990s, China had also become a significant exporter, and the stranglehold of this cultural 'gang of six' had actually increased. (See Human Development Report 2004, UNDP, New York.)
The international trade in cultural goods is growing. 100,000 new songs are released each year, according to the industry body IFPI. Culture around the world is still stunningly diverse. The most popular Brazilian musical form, sertaneja, is hardly known outside the country; while Indian music still commands 90 per cent of the market in India . Yet amid this diversity, there is also growing homogeneity. The USA and UK alone account for almost half of total CD sales worldwide. Only eight albums sold more than five million copies worldwide in 2004 - all bar one by Anglo-Saxons.317 The top ten bestsellers are actually increasing their share of the $34 billion global music market - and it is unclear whether the proliferation of music piracy and pay-as-you-go downloading will promote musical diversity or homogeneity.
Bollywood produces far more films than Hollywood each year, but American films have an estimated 85 per cent monopoly of screenings worldwide. Hollywood is cosmopolitan, open to talented directors and actors from around the world. But critics see it less as a global melting pot than as an industry steeped in American values but tolerant of the occasional foreign fad: Scottish swashbucklers Braveheart and Rob Roy in 1995; Chinese martial arts epics House of Flying Daggers and Hero ten years later.
In 1980, CNN introduced 24-hour news, but the concept of instantaneous live news came to prominence during the cover age of the 1991 Gulf War and the introduction of news websites in 1995. Over this period, the ownership of entertainment, newspapers, television, film and advertising came to be concentrated in the hands of ten major corporations, which jointly control some two-thirds of the global communications industry. These media conglomerates are criticized for creating bland, sanitized 'infotainment' and saturating households with television and commercials, first in the USA and Europe, and then worldwide. On the other hand, news reporting is arguably more balanced than it was in the 1840s, when 10,000 US newspapers vied for readers.
STAR TV, founded by Li Ka-Shing in Hong Kong in 1991, was intended to follow this model, broadcasting English-language, western programming to Asia's upper-middle classes. But STAR gradually metamorphosed into thirty local, more popular channels with programming in eight languages. 'It is widely believed that globally standardized product varieties are displacing locally customized ones in many product categories,' says Pankaj Ghemawat of Harvard Business School . But there is actually no systematic evidence on this subject. (Semiglobalization and international business strategy, Journal of International Business Studies, 2003, p.34, 138-152.)
The phenomenal recent growth in independent weblogs promoting alternative views, news and photos will to some extent balance the concentration of communications media. By last month, there were 20 million blogs, with increasing numbers from China and other countries where censorship remains overt.)
Mickey Hart, ex-drummer of the Grateful Dead, and Alain Jabbour, Director of the American Folklife Center recently collaborated to re-release a series of unique early recordings from West Africa, the South American rainforests and islands of Indonesia under the Endangered Music Project. Such efforts to protect traditional cultural forms in the face of a global onslaught are becoming more widespread. France and Canada both require a minimum amount of domestic musical content on radio. China limits the screenings of US films. The UK Film Council recently decided to use money from the national lottery to subsidize a digital network for cinemas, provided they increase screenings of 'art house' films.
In 2005, the BBC made fresh recordings of the entire works of Beethoven freely downloadable on the internet. 'Putting things on the web, where they are available to the whole world, does not make the world more homogenous', says journalist Andrew Brown. 'It is the sort of globalization that sharpens the distinctiveness of nations and societies'. (Andrew Brown, The Guardian Wrap: A worm's eye view, 6 June 2005.)
Global cultural exchange has contradictory tendencies, then. On the one hand it creates homogeneity. On the other, it can enhance cannibalistic creativity and rescue vulnerable artefacts. In the 1970s, popular culture was pressed into service by environmental and anti-war protesters, for example John Denver's Whose Garden Was This? and Edward Abbey's cult novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. In 1985, Western pop stars came together as Band Aid to draw attention to famine in Ethiopia . After an apolitical period, artists and musicians are once again being pressed into service in global protest movements. Works by Sebastiao Salgado, Damien Hirst and Andreas Gursky have been adopted by anti-globalization activists. In 2005, at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in Brazil , the show was opened by Brazil 's minister of culture, none other than Gilberto Gil, and closed by musical cannibal Manu Chao, with the rallying cry 'another world is possible'.
In summer 2005, dozens of musicians attempted to pressurise the G8 meeting in Scotland to go further on debt relief and international aid. 'What we do in the next five weeks is seriously, properly, historically, politically important,' said Bob Geldof in the run-up to the concerts. 'There's more than a chance that the boys and girls with guitars will finally get' to turn the world on its axis'. The songs helped win some modest concessions but weren't quite enough to rock the world. Cynics point out that anti-global culture has its global market, from coffee-table books to increased record sales. In 2002, Gursky's photo of rows of trainers sold in London for £432,750, a record for a photograph. But what these high-profile interventions showed was the inability of global agencies, governments, NGOs, mainstream media and businesses to engage ordinary citizens in the globalization debate.
These descriptions of the joys of cultural globalization sound remarkably like Keynes's description of the lucky Londoner calling up the world's riches on his telephone in 1914. It's an obvious point that this cultural feast is not on offer for the two and a half billion people living on less than two dollars a day. There are production limits to Persian textiles and shrinking natural resources available for sushi. But can modern technology at least share this cultural opportunity more equitably with the rapidly growing middle classes in Mumbai, Shanghai , Lagos and Sao Paolo? Can it offer a virtual equivalent for those who will never be able to afford the real thing?
Large majorities
in almost every country feel their traditional way of life is being lost.
Although they welcome many aspects of globalization, most people believe
that their way of life should be protected against foreign influence. In
the world of ideas, globalizing tendencies have long been in tension with
local preferences. Today, global exchanges apparently have the upper hand.
But whether it is religion, high art, music, football or surfing the net,
the process has been complex and patchy, both in the benefits it brings
and the extent of the phenomenon. It may be a small world, said comedian
Steven Wright, 'but I wouldn't want to have to paint it'. content on radio.
China limits the screenings of US films. The UK Film Council recently decided
to use money from the national lottery to subsidize a digital network for
cinemas, provided they increase screenings of 'art house' films. In 2005,
the BBC made fresh recordings of the entire works of Beethoven freely downloadable
on the internet. 'Putting things on the web, where they are available to
the whole world, does not make the world more homogenous', says journalist
Andrew Brown. 'It is the sort of globalisation that sharpens the distinctiveness
of nations and societies.
The modern
package of computer, email, world-wide web and mobile phone is now reaching
an unprecedented level of global diffusion. In 2004 alone, over 600 million
mobile phones were shipped - enough for a tenth of the world's population.
Internet access has been growing rapidly, and is approaching a billion
users. Over half the population in rich nations now uses the internet.
The Pew Global Attitudes Survey found in 2002 that two-thirds of people
worldwide think the intern et is a change for the better. Mobile internet,
open-source software and free online information projects like Wikipedia
and Project Gutenberg have enormous potential to reverse the 'digital divide'
between rich and poor.
Thus cultural and technological packages have repeatedly offered the potential to create a small world. Each time, the world did shrink. But it remained stubbornly large and diverse. Will it be different next time? The coming global contraction must overcome two major challenges before this will truly be a small world. The first is our love of the local. The second is the limit to littleness.
The USA , with by far the greatest concentration of internet users, turned to Nostradamus rather than the FBI for web information after 9/11. In January 2005, US humanitarian concerns overcame the usual obsession with shapely celebrities. Brad Pitt was outnumbered six to one by women, suggesting strong gender differences in surfing. Intriguingly, it is the Americans and British, not Indians or Chinese, who use online dictionaries.
For all the talk of the internet as a transformative globalizing technology, what emerges from Zeitgeist is how local most searches are. Enterprises like GeoURL and Quova recognise this, and are making 'geolocation' software to identify the physical location of web sites and internet addresses. 'While any company of any size can deploy an economic presence online', says Quova, 'true e-commerce success has turned out to be a function of - and dependent on - the same business principles that determine success in the brick-and-mortar world. And one of those principles is geographic knowledge'.
IBM is betting on the rebirth of the local with World Board, its proposed system to paste 'virtual information' notice boards onto physical places of interest. 'By one technological route or another, we are on the verge of being able to put information in its place on a planetary scale,' says James Spohrer of the IBM Almaden Research Center . This innovation could change our control over the environment, our notion of place, and our human relationship to information .We will map every metre of this planet. And not just this planet. Geography's premature obituary is also challenged by mobile phones and GPS, which despite all their potential are still mainly used to coordinate nightlife and monitor jogging. Martin Dodge at Imperial College London is a leading authority on mapping cyberspace. The idea that the internet liberates you from geography', he concludes, 'is a myth’. Peter Dodds, Roby Muhamad & Duncan Watts, An Experimental Study of Search in Global Social Networks, Science, Vol 301, 8 August 2003, pp. 827-829.)
The results
of this twenty-first-century version of A Message to Garcia offer important
insights into the shrinking planet. The successful efforts succeeded with
a chain length of between five and seven people - so the world certainly
can be small. On the other hand less than two per cent of all attempts
actually reached the target. Is the world getting smaller? 'I don't think
it is actually shrinking all that much, for the simple reason that the
smaller the world gets, the more difficult it becomes to make it smaller
still. The typical separation between people around the world is already
near its theoretical minimum, and I don't see it changing in a hurry. Furthermore,
if such a thing did happen, and we lived in a world in which most interaction
was virtual, there would be many more important and noticeable changes
in our lives (like none of our friends knowing any of our other friends)
than simply being another step or two closer.
Also, Bill
Clinton and other connectors where famous for their enormous networks of
contacts, but there are both cognitive and practical constraints
to the number of close relationships we can have - people that we know
as people, that we would rush up to if we happened to see them at Shanghai
Airport. Our circle of friends is limited by the size of the human neo-cortex.
To make matters worse, maintaining friendships requires time, and that
is a finite resource for all of us.
In 2001, Russell Hill decided to test the size of people's social networks by asking how many Christmas cards they sent that year. The result? The typical respondent sent cards to 125 people. (R. A. Hill & Robin Dunbar, Social Network Size In Humans, Human Nature, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2003, pp. 53-72.) Hill and Dunbar found that close proximity affects the frequency of contacts, but that people would go to extra efforts to stay in touch with friends who had moved overseas. The size of the network depends on all sorts of factors: gender and age as well as psychological, social and economic factors. But in Dunbar 's view, most people have networks of between 75 and 250 people. This number remains remarkably similar to the networks of the earliest hunter-gatherers.
One could of course also for the sake of argument, argue that if during the battle of Marathon 490BC and its naval replay at Salamis ten years later, the Greeks didn't defeat the Persians there might have been no British empire. But then after the years 500 the Persians, Arabs, Africans, Javanese, Jews, Indians and Chinese created and maintained a ‘global economy’. Whereby ‘the East’ enabled the rise of the West through two main processes: assimilationism and appropriationism.
For an overview of modern roots Globalised Economics go to the centre of P.4 of our Turkeyanalysis as intended as an addition to our overview of the history of Globalization, the newer part can be best understood if read together with Case Study P.3: in Globalization P.1
A
Concise History of the Past and Future of Globalization, P.2
