Archaic globalization
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Archaic globalization is a phase in the history of globalization, often broadly associated with the early modern period and specifically the sixteenth century. This periodization was proposed by the historian A.G. Hopkins in 2001.
Relative to the modern articulations of globalization that followed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, archaic globalization involved small-scale contacts between regional networks of traders or missionaries. A typical instance of archaic globalization might involve European merchants (or their Armenian, Muslim or Indian counterparts) sailing to trading outposts in India or China to purchase small quantities of high-value luxury goods such as silk, porcelain or spices.
Because of the danger and great cost of long-distance travel in the pre-modern period, archaic globalization grew out of the trade in high-value commodities which took up a small amount of space. Examples of such luxury goods would include Chinese silks, Indian calicoes, Arabian horses, gems and spices or drugs such as nutmeg, cloves, pepper, ambergris and opium. The distinction between food, drugs and materia medica is often quite blurred in regards to these substances, which were valued not only for their rarity but because they appealed to humoral theories of health and the body that were prevalent throughout premodern Eurasia.
According to C.A. Bayly, extensive slave trading and the associated mass-production of commodities on plantations is characteristic of the next phase of globalization, proto-globalization.
Bayly also stresses the 'multi-polar' nature of archaic globalization, which involved the active participation of non-Europeans. Because it predated the Great Divergence of the nineteenth century, in which Western Europe pulled ahead of the rest of the world in terms of industrial production and economic output, archaic globalization was a phenomenon that was driven not only by Europe but also by other economically developed Old World centers such as Gujurat, Bengal, coastal China and Japan.
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