Whilst globalisation is a term that gained popularity quickly during the 20th century – we would be naïve in thinking that globalising forces were non-existent before the modern era. The term itself is broad and all-encompassing. Various definitions seek often to present a vision of globalisation with economics and trade as a vogue, and work from the likes of Williamson and O’Rourke centre on the significance of a ‘global economy’ and financial patterns as basis for understanding a globalising world. However, those such as Mazlish see globalisation as a force that affects every person on the globe, requiring to my mind a more rounded approach in the search for its origins. For this reason, it seems most fitting that the 1570s should be the beginnings of globalisation due to the global impact in various manifestations of the connecting of the Worlds, Old and New, through newly established silver trade routes that stretched from Bolivia to China. Not only can this be argued to represent the birth of global trade, but had enormous ramifications in terms of migration, disease, culture and of course further trade. In this sense the 1570s can be seen as a culmination of global process dating back to 1492 that laid the foundations of the interconnectedness and globality that is present in the 21st century.


Naturally the 1570s as a period of interest for the study of globalisation have their limitations. The expansion of trade fostered few global political consequences that can be compared with the likes of the wave of nationalism and liberalism that followed the French Revolution. Similarly, it is difficult to effectively compare the technological and militaristic advances of the decade with those of a post-industrialised society in the United Kingdom and soon after a wider Europe. Harvey’s notion of ‘uneven spatio-temporal development’ certainly rings true; technology failed to advance as quickly in Africa and Asia than in Europe, America and the Far East, and European nations made little attempt at cultural assimilation despite flourishing societies in Asia and the Ottoman empire.


With this said the 1570s constitute a decade in which both singular events as well as already in motion processes really made global connections a tangible reality. Flynn cites the establishment of Manila as a Spanish entrepot as a critical moment for global trade, opening the trade of silver to a route that stretched across both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, linking the Old World with the New. The silver now entering China now originates primarily in Bolivia and Peru and serves to bolster further the silk and porcelain trade between the Ming dynasty and wider Eurasia. This interconnectedness across the continents was influential in the rise of trading companies such as the EIC from the United Kingdom and the Dutch VOC – two key examples of trade that accelerated commerce further into the sphere of globality. To this point, De Vries argues that the progress of global trade in this period is shrouded by a near-blinkered focus on the rivalries between European nations at that time. It was not only trade that for the first time connected Eurasia with the Americas; despite being in many cases largely harmful to populations, it can certainly be argued that migration and the spread of disease represents a connectedness across the globe that hadn’t previously been witnessed. This is highlighted well by the staggering 80% of Native Americans that died as a result of previously unencountered European diseases such as typhus and measles, similarly during this period many mosquito-borne diseases made their way from the tropics to Southern Europe – essentially changing the biological face of the planet. Finally, cultures in this period too continued to converge. Most notably as the Cape Route grew in traffic and significance, culture followed commodity to the Far East, culminating in Rangaku – the incorporation of Dutch learning into Japanese culture. These broad, varied and importantly mutual exchanges that happened during the decade and continued in to the following should be seen as the origins of globalisation, above all because it gave to Christopher Columbus’ colonising mission a globalised purpose.

Bibliography

- Bayly, C.A. ‘“Archaic” and A-Modern Globalization in the Eurasian and African Arena, c. 1750-1850', in A.G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (2002). 

- De Vries, Jan, “Connecting Europe and Asia: A Quantitative Analysis of the Cape-route Trade, 1497-1795”, in Flynn, Dennis O., ed., Global Connections and Monetary History (2003)

- Flynn, Dennis O., and Arturo Giráldez. “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century.” Journal of World History, vol. 13, no. 2, 2002, pp. 391–427. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20078977.

- Jansen, Marius B. “Rangaku and Westernization.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 18, no. 4, 1984, pp. 541–553. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/312333

- Lang, Michael, “Globalization and Its History,” Journal of Modern History, 78/4 (2006) pp. 914-931

- Stearns, Peter N., “Globalization in World History”, Routledge, Oxford, 2010, pp.57-90