The Significance of Early Globalization: Arguments and Evidence

Abstract

In recent decades, economic historians have debated when globalization began. Based upon a narrow definition of globalization focused on price convergence, providing evidence of market integration, one side argues that globalization began in the early nineteenth century. A competing argument defines globalization in broad geographical terms, citing multidisciplinary evidence to support the claim that globalization began during the sixteenth century. Both views are reviewed in this essay. When commodity market integration is considered under the narrow definition of globalization, now known as “hard globalization”, our study reveals abundant evidence of price convergence across markets in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe prior to the nineteenth century (notwithstanding deliberate mercantilist trading company policies designed to hinder convergence of prices). Assessment of globalization must expand beyond purely economic aspects (including price convergence). Imported epidemics dramatically depopulated the Western Hemisphere upon initial arrival of Europeans, for instance, resulting in eventual transoceanic shipment of millions of slaves. Oceanic connections also generated Columbian and Magellan exchanges that transformed physical geographies across Earth, promulgating worldwide agricultural and population explosions with multidimensional feedback loops that continue to reverberate to this day. Our conclusion is twofold: (a) globalization began during the sixteenth (not nineteenth) century, and (b) twenty-first century globalization is characterized by cultural, ecological, economic, epidemiological, demographic, and political interactions initiated 4.5 centuries ago upon fusion of Eastern and Western hemispheres, after 10,000+ years of mutual isolation due to ocean levels that rose by hundreds of feet during the interglacial Holocene.