The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions

Persia attacked mainland Greece in 490 BCE, yielding three historic results. First, the Athenian victory, which repulsed Persia and led to Persia’s ultimate defeat in the Persian-Greek Wars in 449 BCE, marked a decisive victory for the Western civilizations over invasions from the East. Second, the victory of Athens at Marathon, of course, gave us

agriculture was a kind of invention, one that occurred independently in several locations across the inhabited world. It involved a process of learning how to plant selectively the seeds of certain wild plant species, mainly grasses, to enable humanity to cultivate crops rather than simply to gather the natural outputs of these plants.

The lucky latitudes were the site of early technological innovations and long-distance diffusion. Early technologies adopted by 3000 BCE included metallurgy (the Copper Age was underway and the Bronze Age was beginning); early writing such as hieroglyphics in Egypt, proto-cuneiform in Mesopotamia, and early pictographs in China; animal husbandry; t

The story of the great divergence between Europe and Asia is the great drama of the nineteenth-century world economy. This is the period when the world fell into the hands of the North Atlantic powers, first Britain and the other European empires, and then in the twentieth century the United States, especially after World War II. Only with the rapi

In 1660, Britain’s greatest minds, following the path set by Bacon, launched a new Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, and in 1666, King Louis XIV of France launched the French Academy of Sciences, creating important new institutions to promote the new scientific outlook. Europe’s universities and scientific academies offered a

The UN Security Council currently has fifteen members, the P5 plus ten rotating seats with two-year terms and no veto power. The rotating members are elected by five regional groupings: Asia (two seats), Latin America (two seats), Africa (three seats), Western Europe and Others Group (WEOG) (two seats), and Eastern Europe (one seat). Thus, combinin

Europe’s global empires, spanning oceans and continents for the first time, unleashed another new phenomenon, global war, also spanning oceans and continents.

As the sixteenth century progressed, Britain gained mastery over naval design, building fast and maneuverable galleons that could threaten Spain’s warships. The decisive showdown came in 1588, when the Spanish monarch decided to invade Britain to put down the upstart nation. The effort failed disastrously, with Britain’s defeat of the Spanish armad

These Fertile Crescent civilizations achieved an astonishing number of breakthroughs during this period. They created early written legal codes, including the Code of Hammurabi (Babylonia, c. 1790 BCE), which became models of legal codes throughout the classical world. They created grand public structures, not least the pyramids, and considerable p

Europe’s new global-scale trade with the Americas and with Asia also marked the birth of global capitalism, a new system of global-scale economic organization. The new economic system was marked by four distinctive features: (1) Imperial power extended across oceans and ecological zones. The temperate-zone nations of Western Europe colonized tropic