Chapter 3 : The Making of a Global World

Globalisation is often discussed as a recent phenomenon (last 50 years), but the making of the global world has a very long history — of trade, migration, search for work, movement of capital and ideas.

Throughout history, human societies have become steadily more interlinked. Travellers, traders, priests and pilgrims travelled vast distances for knowledge, opportunity, spiritual fulfilment, or to escape persecution. They carried goods, money, values, skills, ideas, inventions, and even germs and diseases.

The Silk Routes are a prime example of vibrant pre-modern trade and cultural links. The name points to the importance of West-bound Chinese silk cargoes.

Fig. 3 – Merchants from Venice and the Orient exchanging goods, from Marco Polo, Book of Marvels, fifteenth century. This illustrates the vibrant pre-modern trade networks that connected Europe with Asia through the Silk Routes.

Food offers many examples of long-distance cultural exchange. Traders and travellers introduced new crops to the lands they travelled. Even ‘ready’ foodstuff in distant parts of the world might share common origins.

Many of our common foods such as potatoes, soya, groundnuts, maize, tomatoes, chillies, sweet potatoes were not known to Europeans or Asians until about five centuries ago. These were introduced after Christopher Columbus accidentally discovered the Americas. Many of these foods came from the original American inhabitants — the American Indians.

Fig. 4 – The Irish Potato Famine, Illustrated London News, 1849. Hungry children digging for potatoes in an already-harvested field, hoping to discover some leftovers. During the Great Irish Potato Famine (1845–1849), around 1,000,000 people died of starvation in Ireland, and double the number emigrated in search of work.

The pre-modern world shrank greatly in the sixteenth century after European sailors found a sea route to Asia and crossed the western ocean to America. The Indian Ocean had known a bustling trade for centuries — with goods, people, knowledge, and customs criss-crossing its waters. The Indian subcontinent was central to these flows.

Before its ‘discovery’, America had been cut off from regular contact with the rest of the world for millions of years. From the 16th century, its vast lands and abundant crops and minerals began to transform trade and lives everywhere.

Until the 19th century, poverty and hunger were common in Europe. Cities were crowded, deadly diseases widespread, and religious conflicts common. Thousands fled Europe for America. By the 18th century, plantations worked by slaves captured in Africa were growing cotton and sugar for European markets.

Until well into the 18th century, China and India were among the world’s richest countries and pre-eminent in Asian trade. From the 15th century, China retreated into isolation. China’s reduced role and the rising importance of the Americas moved the centre of world trade westwards, with Europe emerging as the new centre.

Fig. 5 – Slaves for sale, New Orleans, Illustrated London News, 1851. A prospective buyer carefully inspecting slaves lined up before the auction — two children, four women, and seven men in top hats and suits waiting to be sold. To attract buyers, slaves were often dressed in their best clothes. This depicts the horrific transatlantic slave trade that powered colonial plantations.

The world changed profoundly in the 19th century. Economic, political, social, cultural, and technological factors interacted in complex ways to transform societies and reshape external relations.

In 19th-century Britain, self-sufficiency in food meant lower living standards and social conflict. Population growth from the late 18th century increased demand for food grains. Urban expansion and industrial growth pushed food grain prices up.

Between 1820 and 1914, world trade is estimated to have multiplied 25 to 40 times. Nearly 60% of this trade comprised ‘primary products’ — agricultural products (wheat, cotton) and minerals (coal).

Nearly 50 million people emigrated from Europe to America and Australia in the 19th century. All over the world, some 150 million are estimated to have left their homes.

Railways, steamships, and the telegraph were important inventions that transformed the 19th-century world. But technological advances were often the result of larger social, political, and economic factors. Colonisation stimulated new investments and improvements in transport.

Trade flourished and markets expanded in the late 19th century. But this period had a darker side — expansion of trade and closer relationship with the world economy also meant a loss of freedoms and livelihoods for colonised societies.

Fig. 10 – Map of colonial Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. Note how many borders run straight — almost as if drawn with a ruler. In 1885, the big European powers met in Berlin to complete the carving up of Africa between them. The map shows Belgian, British, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Independent territories.

In Africa in the 1890s, Rinderpest — a fast-spreading disease of cattle — had a terrifying impact on people’s livelihoods and the local economy. This is a classic example of how even a disease could reshape the lives of thousands and their relations with the world economy.

Fig. 13 – Diggers at work in the Transvaal gold fields in South Africa, The Graphic, 1875. After the discovery of gold in Witwatersrand, Europeans rushed to the region despite fears of disease and death. By the 1890s, South Africa contributed over 20% of world gold production.

The example of indentured labour migration from India illustrates the two-sided nature of the 19th-century world — faster economic growth alongside great misery, higher incomes for some and poverty for others.

Growing food and crops for world markets required capital. Large plantations could borrow from banks, but humble peasants needed other financiers.

Fig. 17 – East India Company House, London. This was the nerve centre of the worldwide operations of the East India Company — the vehicle through which Britain controlled India’s trade and eventually its political administration.

Historically, fine cottons produced in India were exported to Europe. With industrialisation, British cotton manufacture expanded and industrialists pressurised the government to impose tariffs on cloth imports into Britain.

Fig. 19 – The trade routes that linked India to the world at the end of the seventeenth century. The map shows sea routes (solid blue lines) and land routes (dashed red lines). The size of circles at ports indicates the volume of trade passing through. Surat was the largest trading port. Key destinations include Canton, Batavia, Malacca, Basra, Alexandria, Aleppo, Mombasa, and Mozambique.

The First World War (1914–18) was mainly fought in Europe but its impact was felt around the world. It plunged the first half of the twentieth century into a crisis that took over three decades to overcome.

Post-war economic recovery proved difficult. Britain, the world’s leading economy pre-war, faced a prolonged crisis. While Britain was preoccupied with war, industries had developed in India and Japan. Britain found it difficult to recapture dominance in the Indian market or compete with Japan internationally.

In the USA, recovery was quicker. The economy resumed strong growth in the early 1920s.

The Great Depression began around 1929 and lasted till the mid-1930s. It brought catastrophic declines in production, employment, incomes, and trade worldwide.

1. Agricultural overproduction: As prices slumped, farmers tried to expand production to maintain income → worsened market glut → prices fell further → farm produce rotted for lack of buyers.
2. US loan withdrawal: Mid-1920s — many countries financed investments through US loans. In first half of 1928, US overseas loans = over $1 billion; a year later = one quarter of that. Countries depending on US loans faced acute crisis.
3. Bank failures in Europe: Withdrawal of US loans → failure of major banks → collapse of currencies (e.g., British pound sterling).
4. Slump in Latin America: Intensified the slump in agricultural and raw material prices.
5. US import duties doubled: US attempt to protect its economy by doubling import duties dealt a severe blow to world trade.
6. US domestic banking collapse: Banks slashed domestic lending, called back loans → farms could not sell harvests → households ruined → businesses collapsed → US banking system itself collapsed.

The impact on India shows how integrated the global economy had become by the early 20th century. The tremors of a crisis in one part of the world were quickly relayed to other parts.

“grow more jute, brothers, with the hope of greater cash.
Costs and debts of jute will make your hopes get dashed.
When you have spent all your money and got the crop off the ground,
…traders, sitting at home, will pay only Rs 5 a maund.” — Bengal Jute Growers’ Lament (illustrating how traders, not farmers, profited from jute cultivation)

The Second World War (1939–1945) was fought between the Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Japan, Italy) and the Allies (Britain, France, Soviet Union, USA). It was waged for six years on many fronts — over land, on sea, in the air.

The framework was agreed at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference held in July 1944 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA.

The Bretton Woods system inaugurated an era of unprecedented growth of trade and incomes for Western industrial nations and Japan.

When WWII ended, large parts of the world were still under European colonial rule. Over the next two decades, most colonies in Asia and Africa emerged as free, independent nations. But they were overburdened by poverty and lack of resources due to long colonial rule.