Why Globalization is Older than We Think
By Ishaan Tharoor

In the first and second centuries B.C., wine from the Greek island of Kos was the toast of the Mediterranean. Famed for its medicinal qualities, this sun-blessed nectar was enjoyed across the ancient world and even reached the western coast of India.

That's what thirsty Indians at the time thought, anyway. Recent archaeological studies of their discarded and supposedly Koan amphorae have concluded that those wines were imitations, produced in Italy and simply packaged to appear as if they were from Kos. Two thousand years before the spread of knock-off Rolexes and bootlegged DVDs, pirated merchandise was a global reality.

The story of the Koan fakes is one of many in Nayan Chanda's Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization. While most of us consider globalization to be a purely contemporary phenomenon â€" conjuring up images of multinational coffee chains and multilingual call centers â€" to Chanda it is as old as humanity itself, and as complex and unpredictable. It "has worked silently for millennia without being given a name," writes the author, a former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review now at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. And it moves through "a multitude of threads connecting us to faraway places from an ancient time." As proof, he has his DNA tested and learns that his distant forebears arrived in the Indian subcontinent by way of Africa.

Chanda's essential ideas â€" that globalization has been a gradual historical process and that we are connected to the past â€" are hardly the stuff of dazzling scholarly insight. But his encyclopedic survey of the forces and events that have connected individuals, societies and cultures is nimbly paced and punctuated by lively anecdotes â€" of catamarans plying Polynesian seas, of Catholic converts in Mexico bearing icons made in Macau of missionaries martyred in Japan, and of the armless boy in an Indian trade delegation who awed imperial Rome by shooting arrows with his toes.

Chanda also draws plenty of parallels with our own day. It's hard to tell whether these comparisons are contrived, elucidative or banal, but they mostly entertain in the way that popular history can. For example, he writes that today's sprawling multinational corporations are modeled on the crown-backed trading houses of England, Portugal and Holland, whose empires themselves followed a continuum stretching back to the ancient kingdoms of Mesopotamia. He contends that the silver and gold bullion mined in Mexico and Peru and shipped across oceans in galleons by the conquering Spanish preceded the convertible currencies and credit cards that now keep the world's economy ticking. NGOs like Human Rights Watch, defending the rights of Latino or Chinese workers, are upholding, Chanda says, the humanistic tradition of priests like the 16th century's Bartolomé de las Casas, who wrote scathing treatises chronicling European abuses of the peoples of the New World.

Serious historians will doubtless mutter, tut and quibble over these simplistic comparisons. But the commuting or holidaying laity will lap them up, as will anyone with a professional interest in globalization. The anarchists, environmentalists, nativists and trade unionists among the latter will certainly be interested to learn that they, too, have their predecessors â€" factory workers in 18th century England rioted over imported Indian cotton, while abolitionists raged against the market forces and military superiorities that respectively drove and enabled whites to turn blacks into slaves.

The same Western powers that bombarded their way into foreign markets and countries now, of course, quiver behind their own protectionist ramparts in fear of cheap Chinese goods, for the processes of globalization are continuously evolving. Indeed they have now "outpaced our mind-set," Chanda warns. Petty tribalism still hampers our thinking, preventing concerted international action on a whole host of dangers such as climate change, the threat of viral pandemics and mass humanitarian crises. How much better, says Chanda, to have the geopolitical and economic grasp of the 16th century Portuguese trader and diplomat, Tomé Pires, as he gazed upon the spice markets of Malacca. "Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice," Pires wrote. "[It is at] the end of monsoons and the beginning of others." An equally informed appreciation of our interconnected fates would better prepare us for the storms ahead.