Chapter 10. Global Society
10.1. Trade, Colonialism, and the Origins of Global Society
Robertson (1990) has argued that an understanding of global society has to begin with the long historical processes by which “the global system has been and continues to be made.” Although he cites the 2nd Century Roman historian Polybius, who noted that “[f]ormerly the things which happened in the world had no connection among themselves…. [b]ut since then all events are united in a common bundle,” it was not until the “germinal phase” of globalization in early modernity (15th – 18th century) that it became realistic to talk about humanity becoming organized as a single global society. Interestingly, Robertson argues that the process of dividing the world into separate national societies was itself an aspect of globalization, rather than an existing or ‘natural’ state of affairs replaced or undermined by globalization.
Robertson (1990) defines several stages on the path to the creation of global society:
Phase I: the germinal phase (15th – mid-18th century)
Phase II: the incipient phase (mid-18th century – 1870s)
Phase III: the take-off phase (1870s – mid-1920s)
Phase IV: the struggle-for-hegemony phase (mid 1920s – mid-1960s)
Phase V: the uncertainty phase, (1960s – present)
These stages can be mapped onto the development of colonialism and contemporary globalization, as described in the sections below.
Silk Roads (1st Century BCE–5th Century CE, and 13th–14th Centuries CE)
People have been trading goods and connecting over distances for almost as long as people have been around. In North America, for example, before the arrival of Europeans, Mississippian culture (ca. 500–1400 BCE) extended from the lower Great Lakes to the southeastern-most points of North America. Mississippians traded goods as far afield as the Bow Valley in Alberta, the Tiger Hills in southern Manitoba, along the Wəlastəkw — a.k.a. St. John River — in what is now New Brunswick, and in the farming villages of the Eastern Woodlands of the southern Maritimes, Quebec and Ontario (Belshaw, Nichel, & Horton, 2020).
In terms of the creation of global society, it was not until the 1st century BCE that a key step towards globalization occurred (Vanham, 2019). The development of the 6500 kilometre long Silk Road marked the shift from trade as a local or regional practice to becoming a global phenomenon. Luxury items originating from China began to appear in Rome, marking the first time in history that such products had traveled such a great distance. Regular trading between distant societies began to become routinized.
Although the intercontinental trade of luxury goods such as silk and spices between Asia and Europe had begun, it was not yet a full-fledged globalization. Silk was mostly a luxury good, and so were the spices that were added to the intercontinental trade between Asia and Europe. As a percentage of the total economy, the value of these exports was tiny, and many middlemen were invol