The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions

This new age of globalization, like the past ages, will create new patterns of global economic activity, jobs, lifestyles, and geopolitics. This new age arrives together with another fundamental development: a human-caused ecological crisis hitting the planet. The dramatic successes of globalization during the past two centuries have sown the seeds

The famed Franciscan friar Bartolome de las Casas argued that the Indians had souls and as such could not be enslaved or mistreated by the encomenderos. Remarkably, the monarchy agreed and in 1542 issued the Leyes Nuevos (New Laws), outlawing the enslavement of indigenous Americans. This act must be regarded as a powerful case of moral reasoning tr

“The world is very different now, for man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”

As of today, there are 193 UN member states, covering nearly the entire world population. Yet in important operational ways, the UN remains a twentieth-century institution guided by rules laid down by the United States in 1945. Most importantly, at the end of World War II, the five victorious allied powers (the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and Uni

Industrialization and the accompanying advances in farm mechanization and agronomic know-how vastly expanded the food production per farmer in the industrial economies. Where it was once necessary for almost all households to be engaged in farming in order to grow enough food for the population, it became possible for a smaller and declining share

A puzzling and counterintuitive finding, based on archeological and anthropological evidence, is that hunters and gatherers seem to have had better nutrition, fewer diseases, more varied diets, less strenuous labor, and longer lives than contemporaneous farm households.2 The evidence includes the larger stature of nomadic populations compared with

By 1820, according to Maddison’s estimates, a significant gap in production per person had already opened between Western Europe and Asia. China, India, and Japan each had incomes per capita of around $600 (in 1990 international dollars) compared with Western Europe’s average of around $1,200 and Britain’s global lead at around $1,700. With the ind

Throughout history, it has been important to understand the threats arising from globalization (disease, conquest, war, financial crises, and others) and to face them head on, not by ending the benefits of globalization, but by using the means of international cooperation to control the negative consequences of global-scale interconnectedness.

The transition from one age of globalization to the next has often been accompanied by war. The passage from the Neolithic Age to the Equestrian Age was marked by cavalry wars arriving from the steppes. The transition to the Ocean Age of global empires was marked by the violence of European conquerors toward native populations and African slaves in