To exactly pinpoint the date to the start of globalization one has to first to define the concept of globalization. According to Bayly, globalization is a “progressive increase in the scale of social processes from a local or regional to a world level.” Although globalization may at period of times be temporarily stagnant or even due to nationalistic protective policies in decline but judging by the general trends for the past five hundred years, it can be said that it is at a progressive increase. The only matter that one may say confidently that is spreading globally and in a progressive increase is looking at it from a disease history perspective which this report would argue that the start of globalization is in 1492 when it is also the beginning of the Age of Exploration.
Nevertheless, one could judge it from an economic perspective, a technological progress, or a cultural point of view. However, it gets fairly messy and confusing to pinpoint the exact date. If the start date is claimed to be the date at which it was introduced is one, hard to examine, and two, subject to frequent revisions whenever new historical records show up. The way in which those thematic markers often can take quite some time to develop and may easily subject to the local political, physical, religious climate which is why most historians like Bayly and Lang describes the date of globalization in periods such as 1750-1850 and the cold war period rather than measure it in the exact year.
In 1492, this special year Christopher Columbus first set sailed west and discovered the “New World” is in fact, a process that will eventually affect the whole world as Hopskin states for the globalization definition. Disease, in this respect, is a clear marker because it spread very quickly, from a local to a regional then to a continental scale, whenever there is human contact. 1492’s Columbian Exchange soon to decimate almost all of indigenous population in the new World due to small pox and influenza, speeding up the process of globalization in all other aspects for the Europeans. One may say that this explanation may be to Eurocentric as it only analyses the biological footprint of the Europeans at this time but since they are the one who are most actively making human contact to other parts of the world, they serve as the first human carrier for disease that will soon unify the world as well.