Globalization in its broadest possible sense
brought the previously separate world zones
of Afro-Eurasia, the Americas, Australasia, and the Pacific
Island societies together with both positive and negative
impacts.
In Australasia and the Pacific, environments
were largely rich enough in resources for populations
to thrive without agriculture.
For instance, in Australia, humans engaged in a practice
called fire-stick farming, which isn't the plant and animal
domestication we usually refer to as agriculture.
Instead it was foraging through the use of setting large forest
fires that would clear new pathways through the brush,
kill and cook a large amount of game,
and take advantage of the round of rejuvenation
that naturally follows a forest fire.
Early agriculture usually leads to a decline
in the living standards of the foragers
who adopted in terms of malnutrition,
backbreaking labor, and the resulting diseases and famines.
Humans only give up foraging when
they're trapped by a lack of new ecosystems
or by population pressure or both.
Australasia only developed agriculture
in Papua New Guinea.
The largest world zone, Afro-Eurasia,
had a lot of advantage from the start in many ways.
We group Africa, Europe, and Asia into one world zone,
because there was a transference of collective learning
even if it was halting and rarely traversed
long distances.
For instance, the Silk Roads enabled trade right from China
to the West of Africa and to Europe for thousands of years.
Most individual traders didn't travel the entire Silk Road,
but piece by piece and trader by trader, goods and information
would travel the entire route.
It wasn't exactly a brimming information superhighway,
but it was something.
In the past 10,000 years, agriculture independently
arose in Afro-Eurasia several times, in the Fertile Crescent,
in East Asia, and in West Africa.
Agricultural surplus gave rise to agrarian states,
which then slowly grew in size.
So now we've reached the first wave of globalization.
Starting with the sustained colonization of the Americas
over 500 years ago, continuing with the colonization
of Australasia and the Pacific 200 to 300 years ago,
humanity once again united into a single global system.
This had a profound effect on the pace
of collective learning.
Unsurprisingly, the modern revolution soon followed.
Like globalization today, the impact took many forms.
Some of them were positive and some of them
were catastrophically negative.
And that brings us to those three Ps--
Printing, Potatoes, and Plagues.
Firstly, printing.
While humanity has had collective learning
for 250,000 years, orally passing along knowledge
from generation to generation, I think
we can agree it's a major step forward
to write something down.
Sort of like a giant Post-it note for humanity.
We can capture things in text to remind ourselves of something
in case we ever forget.
Writing also allowed for the communication
of more complex and sometimes abstract ideas.
Even with writing, the greatest limitation
on collective learning is the circulation of written works.
Most information was still passed on orally.
Literacy was relatively rare until the modern era.
The books that were produced had to be copied out
by hand, which was a process that took a long time
and could include numerous mistakes.
And it made books so expensive that they were essentially
luxury goods.
Printing first emerged in China around 200 BCE.
Blocks of wood were carved with the imprint the printer wanted
to make on the page.
It did mean, however, that each page
had to be skillfully carved, which ate up a lot of time
when trying to compile a full book.
Every page had a unique woodblock.
Around 1050 CE, the Chinese invented movable type,
where different characters on clay tablets
could be rearranged to create a new imprint.
But the thousands of unique characters
made the process impractical for most printers.
And until the 20th century, printing in China
was still dominated by the woodblock.
In the 1200s, the Koreans developed their own metal
movable type, which was more efficient than clay tablets.
There was no printing press of any kind,
but instead the paper was pressed onto the ink type
with a wooden spatula.
These methods allowed East Asia to circulate way
more copies of books than ever before at a rate that
was much more efficient than manuscripts copied by hand.
In the meantime, paper and printing
filtered down the Silk Roads into the Arab world.
And by 900 CE, book production had advanced dramatically.
The Middle East had mostly handwritten books,
but printing undeniably played a role, copying and disseminating
knowledge wider and faster even in its woodblock form.
The Middle East widely used woodblock techniques
to stamp amulets and playing cards.
The stamping practice eventually reached
Europe via the Crusades.
In Europe, printing became more rapid thanks
to the combination of stamping and imprint
on a page via a moveable type and a press inspired
by the winepress.
This had a profound impact on collective learning.
When Gutenberg developed the printing press around 1450,
the largest library in Europe was in the Vatican,
and it was around 2,000 books.
A few centuries later in the 1800s,
a well-to-do middle class lawyer could easily
compile a similarly sized collection.
Book printing went into overdrive.
In just the short span of 50 years between 1450 and 1500,
there were more books printed in Europe
than there had been hand copied in the last 600 years.
Printing presses grew more and more efficient.
By the 19th century when roller presses got involved,
book production was quick and cheap.
Written knowledge became available to more people.
This fueled the scientific revolution,
allowed for rapid exchange of extremely complex ideas,
and greatly enhance the connectivity of information
between millions and millions of potential innovators.
OK.
On to the potato.
Let's go to the thought bubble.
The potato, humble hero of collective learning,
is a root vegetable first domesticated in Mesoamerica
when farming was first getting started.
It has many important advantages for agrarian societies
that literally live and die by the harvest.
Potatoes can grow in all sorts of climates and environments.
They enrich the soil rather than completely
draining its nutrients.
They're a cheap source of energy for humans
and, unlike wheat, don't take as much work to prepare.
In fact, the potato gained the nickname "ready-made bread"
for its miraculous properties in a world before TV dinners.
Potatoes fostered and fed the agrarian societies
of Peru and Bolivia for thousands of years.
In these environments, it wasn't possible to grow
that other American crop, maize, but I'll
stick to one side of the grocery aisle for now.
The potato was established in Europe
in the 1500s due to Spanish and other European sailors packing
them to eat on their trips back from the Americas.
Its yields played a big role in the agricultural revolution
of the 17th and 18th centuries, which
was a vital precursor for the industrial revolution.
What is less well known is how the potato was also
introduced into East Asia in the 1600s, where it was gradually
adopted along with other American crops like yams
and maize and helped to raise the carrying capacity
of the growing population.
Some historians assert that the introduction of the potato
helped to delay some of the worst famines in Asia
by a century.
And the potato raising the carrying capacity of East Asia
brings us back to collective learning.
Printing may have enhanced connectivity,
but the potato led to a clear increase
in the number of potential innovators.
Thanks, thought bubble.
But when talking about the history of potatoes,
it's important to mention the Irish potato famine,
where reliance on mostly one vulnerable kind of potato
and government inaction led to the starvation or migration
of millions of people.
Or its introduction into Africa, where, for generations, it
was viewed as a symbol of colonial oppression.
These are definitely negative impacts of early globalization.
And on that cheerful note, let's go
on to the last of our three Ps, which is definitely
the least fun, plagues.
Afro-Eurasia, with its teeming populations and domestication
of animals, again had the lead.
This time in disease.
It's thought that the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century
CE and the Black Death in the 14th century
CE both arose out of the agrarian lifestyles of humans.
And with higher population densities,
these diseases can spread rapidly.
It didn't help that Afro-Eurasia was
united by the Silk Road, which carried the Black Death
across long distances.
Starting in 14th century East Asia,
it killed an estimated 25 million people.
But then may have been spread by Mongol armies
across the super continent where most famously the Mongols
besieging the Crimean city of Caffa reportedly flung
plague-ridden corpses over the city walls.
Somehow plague eventually got picked up
by traders from Europe, where it killed one third
to one half of the population.
While Afro-Eurasia's large populations
may have been great in terms of potential innovators,
it also produced a greater number of deadly diseases.
And when those diseases were introduced to the Americas,
where people had not built up resistances
over previous generations, the results were horrific.
Measles, smallpox, and other illnesses
struck the Americas for which they had no natural immunity.
And the disease spread with such lightning speed
that illnesses sometimes swept through American populations
faster than Europeans moved inland.
We can't understate this catastrophe.
While it's difficult to know for sure what
the pre-Columbian population of the Americas was,
the mid-range estimate is that the disease
has killed about 50 million people within 100 years.
This tragedy had a clear impact on collective learning.
The tremendous loss of human life
wiped out massive numbers of potential innovators
for several generations.
The loss of population that came with the Columbian exchange
devastated the cultures of America
and crippled their ability to contribute
to humanity as a whole.
As a result, European ideas came to dominate in the Americas.
This homogenization of culture is a familiar aspect
of globalization, and it doesn't always
benefit the pace of collective learning.
The loss of 50 million people is an overwhelming tragedy
not just for the Americas, but for humanity as a whole,
and its repercussions continue to be felt today.
The process of early globalization,
uniting all the world zones, is not
just important for human history.
It's also a crucial moment for the unifying
theme of 13.8 billion years of change.
The acceleration of collective learning by linking together
the globe into a vibrant and rapidly expanding
pool of knowledge was vital to the continued transformation
of complexity in our universe.
And globalization is a process that has not stopped.
It's intensifying with all the positive and negative impacts
involved, but with luck and a lot of wisdom,
hopefully the continued story of globalization
will avoid the horrific human costs of the past
and continue to weave us together
in a world of 7 billion increasingly well-informed
and interconnected innovators.
It is after all what will determine our future
and the outcome of the cosmic tale in our little corner
of the universe.
What do you think this is an example of? Why do you think this?
1 answer
The article provides an in-depth exploration of the concept of globalization and its historical impacts on human societies. It can be seen as an example of historical analysis or interdisciplinary scholarship, as it combines elements of history, sociology, agriculture, disease ecology, and technology to examine the complex interactions between different world zones over time.
The reasons for this classification are as follows:
Historical Perspective: The article traces the evolution of globalization from ancient times to the modern era, assessing how different societies, like those in Afro-Eurasia, the Americas, and Australasia, interacted and affected one another. It identifies key moments, such as the introduction of agriculture and the spread of printing technology, revealing how these elements contributed to collective learning and societal transformation.
Interconnected Themes: The discussion of the "three Ps" (Printing, Potatoes, and Plagues) illustrates the multiple facets of globalization—technological advancements, agricultural developments, and the disastrous consequences of disease spread. This interconnectedness highlights how events in one area can have far-reaching implications across the globe.
Impact of Globalization: The article provides insight into both the positive (enhanced knowledge sharing, agricultural advancements) and negative (diseases, cultural homogenization) consequences of globalization. It emphasizes that the processes of globalization are ongoing, prompting reflection on current issues faced by a globalized society.
Reflective Conclusion: The article concludes by considering the future of globalization, suggesting that an informed and interconnected populace could mitigate some of the horrific human costs associated with past global interactions. This forward-thinking approach aligns well with historical analyses that not only aim to understand past events but also to inform our understanding of future challenges.
Overall, the article exemplifies how history is not just a record of past events but a tool for understanding current and future human dynamics in an increasingly globalized world.
