SECTION II - NCERT

1 SECTION IILIVELIHOODS, ECONOMIES AND SOCIETIES2021 222021 2253 The Making of a Global World1 The Pre-modern WorldWhen we talk of globalisation we often refer to an economicsystem that has emerged since the last 50 years or so. But as you willsee in this chapter, the making of the global world has a longhistory of trade, of migration, of people in search of work, themovement of capital, and much else. As we think about the dramaticand visible signs of global interconnectedness in our lives today,we need to understand the phases through which this world inwhich we live has through history, human societies have become steadily moreinterlinked. From ancient times, travellers, traders, priests andpilgrims travelled vast distances for knowledge, opportunity andspiritual fulfilment, or to escape persecution.

2 They carried goods,money, values, skills, ideas, inventions, and even germs and early as 3000 BCE an active coastal trade linked the Indus valleycivilisations with present-day West Asia. For more than a millennia,cowries (the Hindi cowdi or seashells, used as a form of currency)from the Maldives found their way to China and East Africa. Thelong-distance spread of disease-carrying germs may be traced asfar back as the seventh century. By the thirteenth century it hadbecome an unmistakable Making of a Global WorldChapter IIIThe Making of a Global WorldFig. 1 Image of a ship on a memorial stone,Goa Museum, tenth century the ninth century, images of shipsappear regularly in memorial stones found inthe western coast, indicating the significanceof oceanic 22 India and the Contemporary Silk Routes Link the WorldThe silk routes are a good example of vibrant pre-modern tradeand cultural links between distant parts of the world.

3 The name silkroutes points to the importance of West-bound Chinese silk cargoesalong this route. Historians have identified several silk routes, overland and by sea, knitting together vast regions of Asia, and linkingAsia with Europe and northern Africa. They are known to haveexisted since before the Christian Era and thrived almost till thefifteenth century. But Chinese pottery also travelled the same route,as did textiles and spices from India and Southeast Asia. In return,precious metals gold and silver flowed from Europe to and cultural exchange always went hand in hand. EarlyChristian missionaries almost certainly travelled this route to Asia, asdid early Muslim preachers a few centuries later.

4 Much before allthis, Buddhism emerged from eastern India and spread in severaldirections through intersecting points on the silk Food Travels: Spaghetti and PotatoFood offers many examples of long-distance cultural exc and trav ellers introduced new crops to the lands theytravelled. Even ready foodstuff in distant parts of the world mightshare common origins. Take spaghetti and noodles. It is believedthat noodles travelled west from China tobecome spaghetti. Or, perhaps Arab traderstook pasta to fifth-century Sicily, an island nowin Italy. Similar foods were also known in Indiaand Japan, so the truth about their origins maynever be known. Y et such guesswork suggeststhe possibilities of long-distance cultural contacteven in the pre-modern of our common foods such as potatoes,soya, groundnuts, maize, tomatoes, chillies,sweet potatoes, and so on were not known toour ancestors until about five centuries foods were only introduced in Europeand Asia after Christopher Columbusaccidentally discovered the vast continent thatwould later become known as the 3 Merchants from Venice and the Orient exchanging goods,from Marco Polo, Book of Marvels, fifteenth 2 Silk route trade as depicted in aChinese cave painting, eighth century, Cave217, Mogao Grottoes, Gansu.

5 2255 The Making of a Global World(Here we will use America to describe North America, SouthAmerica and the Caribbean.) In fact, many of our common foodscame from America s original inhabitants the American the new crops could make the difference between lifeand death. Europe s poor began to eat better and live longer withthe introduction of the humble potato. Ireland s poorest peasantsbecame so dependent on potatoes that when disease destroyed thepotato crop in the mid-1840s, hundreds of thousands diedof starva Conquest, Disease and TradeThe pre-modern world shrank greatly in the sixteenth century afterEuropean sailors found a sea route to Asia and also successfullycrossed the western ocean to America.

6 For centuries before, theIndian Ocean had known a bustling trade, with goods, people,knowledge, customs, etc. criss-crossing its waters. The Indiansubcontinent was central to these flows and a crucial point in theirnetworks. The entry of the Europeans helped expand or redirectsome of these flows towards its discovery , America had been cut off from regular contactwith the rest of the world for millions of years. But from the sixteenthcentury, its vast lands and abundant crops and minerals began totransform trade and lives metals, particularly silver, from mines located in present-day Peru and Mexico also enhanced Europe s wealth and financedits trade with Asia. Legends spread in seventeenth-century Europeabout South America s fab led wealth.

7 Many expeditions set off insearch of El Dorado, the fab led city of Portuguese and Spanish conquest and colonisation of Americawas decisively under way by the mid-sixteenth century. Europeanconquest was not just a result of superior firepower. In fact, themost powerful weapon of the Spanish conquerors was not aconventional military weapon at all. It was the germs such as thoseof smallpox that they carried on their person. Because of their longisolation, America s original inhabitants had no immunity againstthese diseases that came from Europe. Smallpox in particular proveda deadly killer. Once introduced, it spread deep into the continent,ahead even of any Europeans reaching there. It killed and decimatedwhole communities, paving the way for 4 The Irish Potato Famine, IllustratedLondon News, children digging for potatoes in a field thathas already been harvested, hoping to discoversome leftovers.

8 During the Great Irish PotatoFamine (1845 to 1849), around 1,000,000people died of starvation in Ireland, and double thenumber emigrated in search of work. Biological warfare?John Winthorp, the first governor of theMassachusetts Bay colony in New England,wrote in May 1634 that smallpox signalled God sblessing for the colonists: .. the natives .. wereneere (near) all dead of small Poxe (pox), so asthe Lord hathe (had) cleared our title to whatwe possess .Alf red Crosby, Ecological 12021 22 India and the Contemporary World56 Explain what we mean when we say that theworld shrank in the could be bought or captured and turned against the not diseases such as smallpox to which the conquerors weremostly the nineteenth century, poverty and hunger were common inEurope.

9 Cities were crowded and deadly diseases were conflicts were common, and religious dissenters werepersecuted. Thousands therefore fled Europe for America. Here,by the eighteenth century, plantations worked by slaves capturedin Africa were gro wing cotton and sugar for European well into the eighteenth century, China and India were amongthe world s richest countries. They were also pre-eminent in Asiantrade. However, from the fifteenth century, China is said to haverestricted overseas contacts and retreated into isolation. China sreduced role and the rising importance of the Americas graduallymoved the centre of world trade westwards. Europe now emergedas the centre of world wordsDissenter One who refuses to acceptestablished beliefs and practicesFig.

10 5 Slaves for sale, New Orleans, Illustrated London News, prospective buyer carefully inspecting slaves lined up before the auction. You can see twochildren along with four women and seven men in top hats and suit waiting to be sold. To attractbuyers, slaves were often dressed in their best 2257 The Making of a Global WorldThe world changed profoundly in the nineteenth century. Economic,political, social, cultural and technological factors interacted incomplex ways to transform societies and reshape external identify three types of movement or flows withininternational economic exchanges. T he first is the flow of trade whichin the nineteenth century referred largely to trade in goods ( ,cloth or wheat).