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The Origins of Globalization: World Trade in the Making of the Global Economy, 1500-1800
Abstract
For better or for worse, in recent times the rapid growth of international economic exchange has changed our lives. But when did this process of globalization begin, and what effects did it have on economies and societies? Pim de Zwart and Jan Luiten van Zanden argue that the networks of trade established after the voyages of Columbus and Da Gama of the late fifteenth century had transformative effects inaugurating the first era of globalization. The global flows of ships, people, money and commodities between 1500 and 1800 were substantial, and the re-alignment of production and distribution resulting from these connections had important consequences for demography, well-being, state formation and the long-term economic growth prospects of the societies involved in the newly created global economy. Whether early globalization had benign or malignant effects differed by region, but the world economy as we now know it originated in these changes in the early modern period.
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... La investigación en general se ha enfocado más en las fuentes endógenas del desarrollo y ha soslayado el rol del comercio de larga distancia del que hablaba Smith. El comercio importa pese a todo, y definitivamente el comercio con América es central para entender la emergencia de Europa y de una economía global a partir de 1500 (De Zwart & Van Zanden, 2018). De la enorme canasta de bienes y productos americanos que contribuyeron a ello, la plata fue el más conspicuo; y su producción, manufactura y comercio fueron fundamentales en aquel proceso. ...
La plata era una necesidad pública en Asia e indispensable para el comercio Europeo con ella. Mientras en Asia la plata no tenía sustitutos, en Hispanoamérica estaba disponible en una abundancia extraordinaria. Los historiadores han estudiado aspectos de la producción y de su comercio, generalmente en una escala regional o local. Así, la minería es analizada separadamente del comercio, y el comercio separado del desarrollo de la economía; más aun, la plata es raramente diferenciada de la moneda de plata. Para la economía internacional, la cantidad de plata americana fue mucho menos importante que su calidad. Ello hizo de esas monedas el medio de pago preeminente en la economía internacional, y el estándar para un sistema de pago internacionales que compensaba los desequilibrios en el comercio marítimo de larga distancia. Este ensayo revisa el rol de Hispanoamérica colonial en la economía internacional a través del comercio con la moneda de plata y desarrolla algunas implicaciones de la expansión económica y la integración de mercados –un crecimiento Smithiano- que propicio. Con la exploración de los aspectos monetarios del comercio internacional, la discusión también revisita algunas cuestiones clásicas de la historiografía; y subraya algunos efectos macroeconómicos para la economía colonial que califican recientes interpreta- ciones sobre niveles de vida y legados coloniales, y aspiran a abrir nuevas preguntas de investigación.
... Southeast Asia has been a central trade hub for many centuries, with merchants spreading both Buddhism and Islam through ports, urban centers, and rural communities (de Zwart & van Zanden, 2018). Reid (1990, p. 1) coined the term "Age of Commerce" (1450-1680 CE) in Southeast Asia, when Indian, Persian, Islamic, Chinese, and European influences shaped the social, economic, and religious landscapes. ...
The planetary-scale problems of our current era make contemporary interfaith research, education and practice a fertile agenda for sustainable human development, locally, nationally, and internationally. The reasons are manifold and compelling and are nurtured by both hindsight and foresight. Looking back, human experience of past interreligious discord reflects a long and harrowing list of disturbing consequences that reverberate across time and space but also offer bright glimmers of hope. Looking ahead, many global challenges now facing humanity can only be mastered if humans from diverse religious backgrounds and faith traditions can meaningfully collaborate in support of human rights, reconciliation, sustainability, justice, and peace. Set against this background, this chapter explores opportunities for interfaith engagement in the twenty-first century. Offering an overview of interfaith approaches, historical examples, and future prospects, this chapter posits that future human well-being, deferential geopolitics, and constructive international relations are, at least in part, predicated on widely shared interfaith consciousness. It also introduces the chapters of this book and thereby showcases both examples of innovative conceptual and empirical research, and fieldwork-informed case studies that invite imitation, application, and multiplication in different settings.
... In some regions, such as Oruro and Parral, labor was almost entirely paid in shares. 139 The extent to which these mechanisms encouraged labor productivity remains a matter of debate among specialists. 140 In the same vein, the notion of forced labor demands analytical nuances. ...
Objective/Context: The paper provides a comprehensive overview of Latin American mining history, exploring cross-pollination opportunities between mining historians and scholars of the emerging field of the history of capitalism. The analysis spans from the region’s integration into global markets during the 1500s to the twilight of export-led growth in the early twentieth century. Methodology: The study builds on an overview of both classic and contemporary literature, offering new insights into understanding existing data on mining history within a global context. By incorporating perspectives from geology, ecology, and economics, the article investigates the connections between specific mineral deposits and different paths of capitalistic development across Latin America. Originality: The paper sketches some of the gaps in the analysis of global and local flows of minerals and comments on notable contributions to the broader field of Latin American history. It introduces innovative approaches for the study of output cycles, geological and ecological endowments, technological spillovers, and mining economics. Conclusions: First, the existing literature has predominantly focused on precious metals, with few scholars studying non-precious metals and non-metallic minerals. Second, the narratives surrounding mining history have been primarily centered on silver, overshadowing the significance of bimetallism in understanding the emergence of global capitalism. Thirdly, examining the microeconomic dynamics of mining in the region may present fresh opportunities to explore the impact of mining on sectoral and managerial transformations. Finally, studies of the two-way interaction of capitalism and mining need to include research on the energy and environmental systems that underpinned mineral extraction and production.
With the great wave of global integration in economy, society and culture, historiography began to acknowledge the importance of interpreting the past at the highest - world level. Under the influence of numerous historians (primarily in the United States and Western Europe) during the 19th century, and to a much greater extent after 1945, rather innovative directions of world, global and transnational history were created trying to overcome contradictions and a narrow interpretation of the history of international relations, national states and local communities. These focused both on local identities and on states as key factors in the past. In the search for phenomena that permeated world societies, historians, under the influence of other social sciences, began to recognize capitalism as par excellence supranational, that is, a world phenomenon. Although it may seem that the interest in capitalism as a building block of global history (that is, the world system as Immanuel Wallerstein said) is more recent and under the influence of the post-Cold War era, the world-historical significance of this phenomenon was first recognized by authors from the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Among them, the German economist, sociologist and historian Werner Sombart (1863-1941) has a special place, since he devoted several decades of his career to the study of this phenomenon.
This article contributes to the scholarly discourse on the repercussions of trade liberalization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that contributed to early globalization, offering a perspective that extends beyond the traditional focus on Atlantic economies. Our study centres on East and Southeast Asia, pivotal in Pacific and Indian Ocean trade. We overcome data scarcity by presenting a new, partner‐disaggregated imports dataset spanning 10 ports across the region from 1795 to 1839. Employing a gravity model and incorporating interactions, we assess the degree of intra‐Asian trade and its evolution following key events that liberalized East and Southeast Asian commerce in a period when measurable global integration started to become apparent. Supporting new Asian scholarship, our results highlight the remarkable intra‐Asian trade before the high colonial era. We also show that, in general, colonial trade policies fostering inter‐continental trade disproportionately augmented colonial imports in East and Southeast Asia, eclipsing gains in intra‐Asian or Pacific trade, especially before 1830. We explore the impact of the influx of British textiles in the region as a mechanism to explain these trends. Our study illuminates complex trade dynamics in East and Southeast Asia during a transformative period of measurable global integration.
The political fortunes of recent campaigns targeting “modern slavery” and human trafficking have been shaped by strategic calculations and institutional interests. Different actors have been attracted to the category of modern slavery for different reasons. For civil society campaigners, modern slavery offers a way of harnessing the iconography of transatlantic enslavement to draw attention to “exceptional” cases of exploitation. Conversations about modern slavery can also be strategically useful for many governments and corporations, since they can help to deflect or displace more challenging questions about the systemic abuse and exploitation of precarious migrants and workers. These calculations play a key behind the scenes role when it comes to determining whether different cases of exploitation and coercion are classified as the same as, similar to, or separate from historical systems of enslavement.
The National Socialists regarded the population of Eastern Europe, if they were not to be killed or left for dead, as a reservoir of slave labor that would guarantee the Germans a higher standard of living. The Reichsführer SS, Heinrich Himmler, formulated this in unvarnished clarity in his infamous Posen speech from October 4, 1943: “Whether the other peoples live in prosperity or whether they die of hunger, that interests me only to the extent that we need them as slaves for our culture, otherwise it does not interest me.” This chapter examines the use of state-sponsored slave labor in Nazi Germany.
During the medieval period, people in the Black Sea region both owned slaves and exported them. The majority of Black Sea slaves were not born into that status; they became enslaved either through capture or sale. Once enslaved, they might be kept locally for domestic and sexual service, or they might be commodified and sold into long-distance commercial networks that extended east toward China and west toward the Mediterranean. An end to enslavement could not be taken for granted: some slaves were ransomed, some were individually manumitted, some escaped, but many died in slavery.
In the early 1840s and following the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade by several European nations and the United States, European humanitarians—particularly the British—embarked on an earnest campaign to outlaw the vigorous enslaving activities thriving in the Middle East and North Africa. This chapter examines the extent to which the marked increase of enslavement activities and their suppression through the pressure of European abolitionism fits into the saga of the nineteenth-century transformation processes characterized by the rise of European domination of the region. Focusing on the enslavement of Black Africans, the chapter examines the impact of state modernization schemes and the rise of European capitalism on the expansion of enslaving activities and their suppression and argues that no prior historical development has shaped the contours of African slavery in the Middle East and North Africa more than the effects of the nineteenth-century transformation process.
The speed of ships is a crucial variable in shipping productivity. Despite the dominance of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Eurasian trade in the early modern era, its ships were generally slower than those of other companies. This article investigates the causes of this gap in shipping speeds. We dismiss reasons that highlight more numerous stops, longer routes, inferior navigation and restrictive instructions, and emphasize differences in ship design resulting from constraints imposed by the Dutch shallow inland waterways, and the slow adoption of copper sheathing in the late eighteenth century, as plausible explanations.
This article presents new estimations of per capita GDP in colonial times for the two pillars of the Spanish empire: Mexico and Peru. We find dynamic economies as evidenced by increasing real wages, urbanization, and silver mining. Their growth trajectories are such that both regions reduced the gap with respect to Spain; Mexico even achieved parity at times. While experiencing swings in growth, the notable turning point is in 1780s as bottlenecks in production and later, the independence wars reduced economic activity. Our results question the notion that colonial institutions impoverished Latin America.
We test various hypotheses about the causes of the Little Divergence, using new data and focusing on trends in GDP per capita and urbanization. We find evidence that confirms the hypothesis that human capital formation was the driver of growth, and that institutional changes (in particular the rise of active Parliaments) were closely related to economic growth. We also test for the role of religion (the spread of Protestantism): this has affected human capital formation, but does not in itself have an impact on growth.
This article is a survey and critique of recent endeavours to establish statistical foundations for a chronology for the great divergence based upon trends and levels in relative wages. Our reading of the bibliography in Chinese labour history, together with a preliminary investigation into other primary sources, suggests that the Kuznetsian paradigm for empirical economics may not be viable for the construction of analytical narratives for the Chinese and other premodern imperial economies in South and West Asia. Nevertheless, two datasets currently in print will continue to be quoted to lend support to numerically grounded speculations for levels and trends in real wages and welfare for the families of wage-dependent urban workers in China over the eighteenth century. Statistical evidence for the Ming and Qing dynasties calibrated for the purposes of comparing real wage levels for wage-dependent labour between China and western Europe can, however, be placed on a spectrum for accuracy and inferential analysis that runs from ‘unfounded guess work’ to ‘plausible conjectures’. The unwelcome contention of this article is that the data published and potentially available for China (and probably for India and the Ottoman Empire) stand close to the unfounded guess work end of that spectrum. Meanwhile, and as a speculative conclusion, we offer a conjecture that the ‘real wages’ for Qing China's tiny proletariat, whose income included high proportions of wages in kind, have remained as elusive as they were when the real wage debate began a decade ago.
This article provides a comparison of long-term changes in inequality in two key areas of preindustrial Europe: Central-Northern Italy and the Low Countries. Based on new archival material, we reconstruct regional estimates of economic inequality during 1500-1800 and use them to assess the role of economic growth, social-demographic variables, proletarianization, and institutions. We argue that different explanations should be invoked to understand the early modern growth of inequality throughout Europe since several factors conspired to make for a society in which it was much easier for inequality to rise than to fall. Although long-term trends in economic inequality were apparently similar across the continent, divergence occurred in terms of inequality extraction ratios.
I contribute to the debate on the timing of the Little Divergence within pre-industrial Europe. I add Polish real wages to
the comparative framework by comparing them with the English and Italian series. I compile existing data for Poznań, Lublin,
and the Polish agricultural sector. I add this information to the internationally available evidence for Cracow, Gdańsk, Warsaw,
and Lviv. I demonstrate that the more processed grains, i.e., beer and bread, feature in a basket used to deflate wages, the
greater the observed superiority of London over the Polish cities. I also show that Poland was characterised by the widest
income gap between the urban and rural sectors. I account for income differences between sectors by weighting the income series
by occupational structures. The evidence suggests that England was richer than Poland by 1500. The countries converged around
1600. Subsequently, Poland began to lag behind from the seventeenth century onwards.
This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the origins of globalization. It examines the process of commodity price convergence, an indicator of globalization, between Europe and Asia on the basis of newly obtained price data from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives. Prices for many commodities in the Dutch-Asiatic trade converged already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a result of the growth of trade and competition among traders and companies. The extent of convergence, however, was determined, in part, by the ability of the VOC to control commodity markets.
When historians reflect on involuntary migration in the early modern period, the Atlantic slave trade almost invariably comes to mind first. This is understandable. In the three and a half centuries after its inception in the early sixteenth century, transatlantic slave trafficking was responsible for the forced migration of some 12.5 million Africans to the Americas. This was the largest coerced oceanic migration in human history. Seen by some as a “black Holocaust,” the Atlantic slave trade is now considered to have had profound effects on the repeopling of the Americas following the devastating impact on the post-Columbus demographic history of Native Americans. Some three times as many enslaved Africans landed in the “New World” as white settlers from Europe before 1820. Yet though due attention has to be given to the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, European colonization of the Americas had its origins in the Mediterranean, where involuntary labor and slave trafficking, involving Africans as well as non-Africans, was a common feature of life for centuries before 1492 and was to remain so for several centuries thereafter. Moreover, just as involuntary labor was critical to the resettlement of the Americas after 1492, so it became pivotal to the early modern consolidation of state power in land-rich and population-scarce central and eastern Europe in the form of serfdom, where it gave rise to formal systems of labor exploitation that, according to some historians, were akin to slavery and, legally at least, outlived formal African slavery in the Americas.