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, Bisla­ma 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 re-opened 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,ac­)

The emergence of global culture?

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.)

These local limits to further globalization are surmountable.
After all, millions of people have already shaken off local shackles, broadened their horizons and embraced the globe. The Small World Project at Columbia University decided to find out. Researchers Duncan Watts, Peter Dodds and Roby Muhamad asked 60,000 volunteers from 166 countries to try to get an email message to an unknown person. The targets ranged from a US academic to an Estonian archivist and an Indian con­sultant. Participants could choose any known intermediary they thought would be able to get the message closer.

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 wou.1d 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.

People might like to increase their circle of acquaintances to well beyond the value of 100-200, but they simply can't do it. In other words, the planet can't get much smaller. If you don't already know Kevin Bacon, you probably never will.

When Indian police discovered explosives and bomb-making material in a Mumbai(Bombay), railway station March 11, it reminded of the fatwa issued in Delhi 1857*, declaring a jihad against in this case the British. Yet in each case, it was intended to regain their ‘lost glory of the Mughal Empire’. An idle dream as it is, today’s advocates of this idea still can be found in Pakistan/Kashmir.

 

History of Globalization: In and out of India P.1: The First Trade-Wars.

History of Globalization: In and out of India P.2: The First Multinational Companies.

Globalization and Economics: A Search for the Holy Grail?

Humans tend to see themselves as living in a civilization. And they understand civilization to be centred on a shared destiny, often called the public good. Today our obsession with a certain kind of austere, abstracted measurement is closely tied to the idea of a civilization that believes it is being led by economics. That sort of leadership involves a bizarre contradiction: an aggressive certainty that these economics can be measured with great precision versus a passive certainty that they can only very marginally be shaped. Aggressive on the details, passive on the larger picture.

A recent bestseller titled “The World is Flat,” is constructed from powerful metaphors and vivid images backed up by a few personal anecdotes. But of course it is not true. The real facts, which would undermine the flat-earth metaphor, remain invisible or nearly so, because we are so conditioned to connect the-image dots. The argument of a race to the top, driven by more and better education everywhere, could easily turn the argument around. The flat world is a threat, and the only way to keep out threats is to close our borders and close our minds. Where a few places, are on the leading edge of how to build a society with a constantly evolving set of citizens and cultures, others are in complete denial of what is happening to them or soon will happen.

March 17, 2006: Postscript: Where did all the Money Go?

 

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