| Sixty thousand years ago, the children of an "African Eve" walked off that continent and on to, over the next 50,000 years, Asia, Australia, Europe and America. A DNA sample taken from Nayan Chanda diagnosed his lineage among "the very earliest pre-historic migrations into India" and "rarely found outside India"; so too the Yellow Emperor, to which Chinese myth abrogates the descent of the Chinese people, if at all he existed, "had an African mother".
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| But migration""legal or illegal""is only one aspect of a globalised world in which we cannot think of an Indian meal without chillies, potatoes or tomatoes, none of which are native to India; or life without books (for which thank the Egyptians and Chinese), or mathematics (the Arabs used the Indian zero to create rules without which computers would not have been possible). Coffee, discovered in Ethiopia, first associated with the Arabs, gave rise to coffeehouses in Turkey, and later Austria, was brought by the Dutch to France, became hugely popular in Italy and England, was smuggled out of Mecca by an Indian pilgrim to start a plantation in south India, while a few berries sneaked into Brazil were to make it the world's largest coffee producer. If the rice the Japanese eat is not local to that land, the rubber plantations on which the economies of Malay and Burma were based originated from the Amazon.
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| Even earlier, the pharaohs of Egypt sent out expeditions in search of slaves; trade existed between the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia; donkey caravans traded between Assyria and Anatolia (present-day Turkey); the Silk Route connected China with Europe. Indians may now be discovering the pleasures of Italian chianti but in the heyday of the Roman Empire wine produced on the Greek island of Kos was exported to India "in typical Koan amphorae".
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| Today, the iPod, "designed by Apple in California, assembled in China" is the ultimate globalised cliche: "The microdrive that was at the heart of the machine was made by Hitachi in Japan, the controller chip was made in South Korea, the Sony battery was assembled in China, the stereo digital-to-analog converter was made by a company in Edinburgh, Scotland, the flash memory chip came from Japan, and the software on a chip that allows one to search for and play ten thousand songs was designed by programmers at PortalPlayer in India." Still think it is American?
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| It was not just traders who laid the foundations for a globalising world but also warriors (Alexander's campaigns, for instance) and preachers (the teachings of the Buddha, Christ and the Prophet swiftly spread by missionaries as they set about converting new lands under the sway of the dominions they represented). Science contributed with every new development""the telegraph, with cables laid over the seabed, every bit as revolutionary as the Internet today.
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| Recent anti-WTO protests point to the "double-edged nature of globalisation": "Cotton grown in one place was turned into clothing in another; backbreaking labor by coffee pickers in Kenya produced hefty profits for coffee retailers in New York and London. Basic human sympathy for poorly paid workers and small local producers bound the world even more closely..." Passions with regard to profit at the cost of human misery have been part of the globalisation story for centuries, not least of which must include the spread of diseases like the Black Death, Spanish Flu, plagues, avian flu viruses, and even SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome). Just as frightening has been the scale of manufacturing to cater to demand, bringing with it fears of world domination through trade. If the South Korean government has "launched a globalization campaign as a means of getting ahead" using its chaebols to create mega-hubs, even a Fortune report in 1995 gasped somewhat naively: "Mega-merchants like Wal-Mart and Carrefour are building monster stores worldwide at a breakneck rate. The planet isn't big enough for all of them." The World Bank took cognizance of it on its part with a simple enough message: "Globalization drives growth".
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Chanda says that "increasing integration has provoked resistance" throughout history, but "[W]hat makes the impact of today's globalization appear so different is that it is highly visible" in our media-connected world. As anti-globalisation tirades build up, Chanda sums up, it is not globalisation but some of the inequities of globalisation that must be tackled because "[E]conomic integration...has far outpaced our global mindset, which is still rooted in nationalist terms". And, given this reviewer's likely DNA coding, I'm not sure whether that should be Indian, Central Asian...or African!
Bound Together
How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and
Warriors Shaped Globalization
| | | Nayan Chanda
Penguin/Viking
Rs 525; xvi + 391 pages |
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