Seeds of Globalization
The term "globalization" refers to the increasing interconnectedness of nations and peoples around the world through trade, investment, travel, popular culture, and other forms of interaction. Many historians have identified globalization as a 20th-century phenomenon connected to the rise of the Western-dominated international economy. However, extensive interaction between widespread peoples, as well as travel over vast distances across regions of the world, has existed for many centuries. By 1000, the seeds of globalization had already taken root in the eastern hemisphere, particularly in the lands bordering the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. These were the most dynamic regions in the world at that time, and their interactions were extensive.
To understand how globalization first took root between 1000 and 1500, one must focus on contact between distant peoples in Asia, especially contact carried on through long-distance trade. Interregional trade has been a major force throughout world history because it fosters other forms of exchange, including the spread of religions, cultures, and technologies. For many centuries, the most outstanding example of overland interaction was the Silk Road, a trade route through Central Asia. Maritime trade flourished as well; the Indian Ocean became the heart of the most extensive seagoing trade network in the premodern world. Islamic merchants dominated this network, spreading their religion far and wide. Islamic expansion established a huge cultural region that stretched across the entire eastern hemisphere.
Trading ports such as Melaka in Malaya became vibrant, globalized centers of international commerce and culture. Chinese ships would later follow this trading network in undertaking the greatest oceanic explorations in world history to that point. This exploration confirmed the crucial role played by this Afro-Eurasian maritime commerce and the dynamism of some Asian civilizations. The exchanges across Asia at this time, including the spread of Islam, were significant enough that we can speak of a globalized economy and culture.
Trade and Interregional Contact
One characteristic of globalization in the modern age has been expanding commerce between countries around the world. The roots of this phenomenon reach far back in history. Long-distance trade routes grew out of the transportation systems that developed out of the need to move resources by land and sea. In turn, trade and expansion led to increased contact between different civilizations and societies. This contact enabled Indian influence, including that of Buddhism, to spread over the land and sea trading routes into Central Asia, Tibet, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia between 200 BC and AD 1500.
From around 200 BC to around AD 1000, the most significant example of interaction and long-distance trade was the Silk Road, which stretched across central and southwest Asia, linking China to India, western Asia, and the Mediterranean. Along the Silk Road, goods, people, and ideas traveled thousands of miles between China, India, and Europe. Silk, porcelain, and bamboo from China were carried west across the deserts, mountains, and grasslands to Baghdad and the eastern Mediterranean ports, and then shipped by sea to Rome.
The maritime system established on the Indian Ocean grew more important between 1000 and 1500, eventually surpassing overland trade. The oceanic routes between Southeast Asia and the Middle East greatly expanded. Traders from Arabia, Persia, and India visited the East African coast, and many Asians and Africans enjoyed a long period of lucrative and relatively free seagoing trade.
The Silk Road and the Mongol Empire
Between 1250 and 1350, the Mongols established and controlled the largest land empire in world history. This empire stretched from Korea to Vienna, placing a huge bloc of the world's population under Mongol control. The Mongols brutally conquered Siberia, Tibet, Korea, Russia, much of Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Persia, Turkey, and parts of Arab civilization in the Middle East. Western Europeans were too remote and underdeveloped to give reason for conquest and thus did not suffer the ravages experienced by other peoples. In 1279, China, a more formidable foe and tempting prize than Western Europe, was added to the Mongol-ruled realm.
One cannot underestimate the importance of the Mongol era to world history or its role in establishing an early form of globalization. In the 20th century, globalization enabled Western technology to reach other parts of the world. Some historians consider the Mongols the great equalizers of history because during their rule, they permitted the transfer of technology from the more developed East Asia to the more backward Western Europe. They did this by reopening and protecting the Silk Road, however briefly. During the Mongol era, Chinese inventions such as gunpowder, printing, the blast furnace, silk machinery, paper money, and playing cards found their way to Europe, as did many medical discoveries and such domesticated fruits as the orange and lemon. The Mongols paved the way for greater global communication, opening China's doors to the world. One Chinese monk, a Nestorian Christian, became the first eastern Asian visitor to Rome, England, and France. In addition, some Chinese people settled in Persia, Iraq, and Russia. This movement was possible because travel from one end of Eurasia to the other was easier than ever before.
Furthermore, the Mongols unwittingly set in motion changes that would later allow Europe to catch up with and eventually surpass China. Some of these changes were based on European improvement of such Chinese inventions as printing, gunpowder, the stern-post rudder, and the magnetic compass. For example, in about 1050, the Chinese invented movable type. The Europeans later developed a better technology, and in the 1450s Johannes Gutenberg used movable type to produce multiple printings of the Bible. Likewise, the Chinese invented the first flamethrower. By the 13th century the flamethrower had evolved into a primitive gun—one major reason the Mongols took so much longer to conquer China than other civilizations. As these weapons were transported to Europe during the Mongol Era, and then improved, late medieval European warfare became far deadlier than it had been before.
Today's globalized world has been characterized by a brain drain, or exodus of talented people from various continents to Europe and North America. The world in the 14th century witnessed the same phenomenon; however, the flow moved the other way, from west to east. In China, the Mongol administration relied on a large number of foreigners who came to serve in what was effectively an international civil service. These included many Muslims from West and Central Asia as well as a few Europeans who found themselves drawn to the fabled Cathay, as they called it. One such person was the Italian traveler and author, Marco Polo. Polo claimed to have spent seventeen years in China, mostly in government service. Eventually he returned home to tell unbelieving Europeans of the wonders he encountered or heard about from other travelers. Polo’s reports seemed incredible because at that time China was well ahead of other Eurasian civilizations in many fields.
For these reasons, the Mongol Empire was one of the most important land empires in history. Yet in spite of the success of Mongol civilization during the 1200s, their empire would prove short-lived. Unlike other empires, the Mongols never took advantage of the maritime commerce developing at the time.
The Globalization of Islam and the Indian Ocean Maritime Trade System
Between the 8th and 15th centuries, Islam ventured out of its Arabian heartland in the Middle East to become the dominant religion in many parts of Africa and Asia and in Iberia. Muslim groups emerged in such different and geographically distant locations as China and the Balkans. In the process, an interlinked Islamic world called dar al-Islam (the Abode of Islam) emerged, a world that was joined by both a common faith and trade connections. The dar al-Islam stretched from Morocco to Indonesia.
This global Islamization spread Arab names, words, alphabet, architecture, social attitudes, and cultural values to peoples around the world. The great 14th-century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battūtah spent decades touring the extensive dar al-Islam. He traveled from Mali in Africa and Spain in the west to Southeast Asia and the coastal ports of China in the east. Whereas the Christian Marco Polo was always a stranger in his travels, everywhere Ibn Battūtah went, he encountered people who shared his general worldview and social values.
Muslim-dominated trade routes, which ultimately reached from the Sahara to Spain to the South China Sea, fostered travel. The key to their success was a more complex and increasingly integrated maritime trade throughout the Indian Ocean. This trade network linked China, Japan, Vietnam, and Cambodia in the east through Malaya and the Indonesian archipelago. From there it crossed into India and Sri Lanka, and then moved westward to Persia, Arabia, the East African coast as far south as Mozambique, and the eastern Mediterranean, finally connecting to Venice and Genoa.
The Strait of Hormuz on the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Melaka in Southeast Asia were the major pillars of what became the most important mercantile system of the premodern world. It was through this mercantile system that the spices of Indonesia and East Africa; the gold and tin of Malaya; the batik and carpets of Java; the textiles of India; the gold of Zimbabwe; and the silks, porcelain, and tea of China made their way to distant markets. When many of these products reached Europe, people there yearned to find their sources in the East, sparking the European age of exploration. Maritime trade flourished, especially in the 14th century after the Mongol empire ended and the spread of the Black Death, the bubonic plague, throughout Eurasia disrupted overland trade. The maritime network reached its height in the 1400s and 1500s, when Muslim political power was reduced but its economic and cultural power remained strong.
Islam and the Rise of Melaka
Various states around the Indian Ocean and South China Sea were closely linked to maritime trade. For example, East African city-states such as Mombasa and Kilwa, with their mixed African-Arab Swahili culture, thrived for many centuries. Merchants in India, including many Jews and Arabs, maintained close ties to Western Asia, North and East Africa, Southeast Asia and China. No political power was dominant along the maritime trading route. Its vigor depended on cosmopolitan port cities such as Hormuz on the Persian coast, Cambay in northwest India, Calicut on India's southwest coast, and Melaka near the southern tip of Malaya. Of all the cities, historians probably know the most about Melaka, and this city well illustrates premodern patterns of globalization. Southeast Asia had long been a cosmopolitan region where peoples, ideas, and products met. Some rulers of coastal states in the Malay Peninsula and Indonesian archipelago, anxious to attract the Muslim traders who dominated interregional maritime commerce and attracted by the universality of Islam, adopted the faith.
The arrival of Islam in Southeast Asia coincided with the rise of Melaka, which became the region's political and economic power. Melaka became the main base for the expansion of Islam in the archipelago, as well as the last stop on the eastern end of the Indian Ocean trading network. Melaka's pivotal role in world trade was confirmed by an early 16th-century Portuguese visitor, who wrote that it had "no equal in the world" and proclaimed its importance to peoples and trade patterns as far away as Western Europe. "Melaka is a city that was made for merchandise, fitter than any other in the world…” he wrote. “Commerce between different nations for a thousand leagues on every hand must come to Melaka.… Whoever is lord of Melaka has his hands on the throat of Venice."
During the 1400s, Melaka was a flourishing trading port attracting merchants from many lands in Asia and Africa. More ships dropped anchor in Melaka’s harbor than in any other port in the world; seagoing merchants were attracted by its stable government and free trade policy. Among Melaka's population of 100,000 to 200,000 people were about 15,000 foreign traders, among them Arabs, Egyptians, Persians, Turks, Jews, Armenians, Ethiopians, East Africans, Burmese, Vietnamese, Javanese, Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, and Indians from all over the subcontinent. On the city's streets, some 84 languages were spoken.
Melaka had a special connection to the Gujerati port of Cambay, which was nearly 3,000 miles away, because merchants from Gujerat in northwest India were Melaka’s most influential foreign community. Every year trading ships from around the Middle East and South Asia would gather at Cambay and Calicut to make the long voyage to Melaka. The ships carried grain, woolens, arms, copperware, textiles, and opium for exchange. Melaka had become one of the major trading cities in the world, a multiethnic center of globalized culture and commerce, much like New York, Los Angeles, or Hong Kong are today.
Ming China and the World
The extent of globalization by the early 15th century is suggested by the great Chinese voyages of discovery. The emperor of the Ming dynasty, Yonglo (or Yung-lo), dispatched a series of grand maritime expeditions to southern Asia and beyond, expeditions that were the greatest the world had ever seen. Admiral Zheng He (or Cheng Ho), a Muslim whose father had visited Arabia, commanded seven voyages between 1405 and 1433. These voyages were huge undertakings, with the largest fleet including 62 vessels carrying nearly 28,000 men. (By contrast, a few decades later, Christopher Columbus would sail forth from Spain in three small vessels crewed by a hundred men.) The massive Chinese junks were far superior to any other ships of the time. In fact, the world had never before seen such a large-scale feat of seamanship.
During these extraordinary voyages, ships carrying the Chinese flag followed the maritime trade routes through Southeast Asia to India, the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, Arabia, and down the East African coast as far as Kilwa in Tanzania. Melaka became their southern base, and Melaka’s rulers made occasional trips to China to cement the alliance. Had the Chinese ships continued, they would have had the capability of sailing around Africa to Europe; however, Europe offered few products the Chinese valued. The Chinese expeditions expressed the exuberance of an era of great vitality. Although the Chinese traveled mostly in peace and fought only a few military actions, some 36 countries, including a few in western Asia, acknowledged allegiance to China. In this period, China was the greatest power in a globalizing hemisphere.
Historians still debate the reasons for Zheng He's great voyages. Some see diplomacy as the primary goal, with the recognition by so many foreign countries reaffirming the emperor's position. Others point to commercial motives, since the voyages came at the time Chinese merchants were becoming more active in Southeast Asia. In the early Ming period, China remained the most advanced civilization in the world. Commercially vibrant and outward-looking, Ming China could have opened greater communication between the continents and become the dominant world power well beyond eastern Asia. However, it never did. The grand voyages to the west and the commercial thrust in Southeast Asia came to a sudden halt when the Ming emperor ordered a return to isolationism and recalled all Chinese people living outside the empire.
How can we account for this stunning reversal that, in the perspective of later history, seemed so counterproductive? Perhaps the voyages were too expensive even for the wealthy Ming government. The voyages were not cost-effective because the ships returned chiefly with exotic goods, such as African giraffes for the imperial zoo, rather than mineral resources and other valuable items. It seems that the full possibilities of globalization were not apparent to Chinese leaders. Furthermore, in the Chinese social system, merchants lacked status. And unlike Christian Europe, China had little interest in spreading its religion and culture. The Mongols were regrouping in Central Asia, and the Ming court was forced to shift its resources to defend the northern borders. As a result, the oceans were left open to the Western Europeans, who improved upon Chinese and Arab naval and military technology and soon challenged Arabs, Indians, and Southeast Asians for supremacy in the Indian Ocean trading system.
The End of the First Globalized System
By the end of the 1400s, the reputation of such cities as Melaka, Canton, Calicut, and Hormuz as treasure troves of Asian luxuries had reached Europe. Anxious to gain direct access to Asian trade, the Portuguese finally made their way to India in 1498 and Melaka in 1509, inaugurating a new era of European activity in Asian history. Indeed, the Portuguese seized Melaka in 1511. Despite Portugal’s superiority in ships and weaponry, its standard of living was probably inferior to that of people in the more developed societies of Asia. This no doubt contributed to the tendency of Europeans to use armed force to obtain their commercial and political goals. This tendency ensured that the globalization of the world over the next five centuries would be under the auspices of Western Christians rather than the Muslims, Indians, and Chinese who established the basic framework between 1000 and 1500.
About the author: Craig Lockard is the Ben and Joyce Rosenberg Professor of History in the Department of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He is the author of "Dance of Life": Popular Music and Politics in Modern Southeast Asia.