Everyday commodities like the clothes we wear, the coffee we drink and the ubiquitous microchip that powers the Information Age all have grown out of the interconnectedness
brought about by the millennia of trade contacts, military conquests and explorations of the physical world, says Nayan Chanda of the Yale Centre of the study of Globalsiation in his book, 'Bound together'.
The growth of trade from the dawn of human civilization to the present shows how an increasingly wider part of the world has been tied together through a web of commerce. The boat as the form of transport had opened up huge possibilities for long-distance connections. One item that was in great demand in the arid alluvial plains of Mesopotamia was wood to build palaces, temples and furniture, and it could be found on
the shores of the eastern Mediterranean and in India, he says.
Exports from India were not just luxuries; even small monkeys from the subcontinent became popular pets for the wealthy Mesopotamians! Trade between the Mediterranean and India had developed enough in the third century BC for the Indian king Bindusara to ask the Greek king Antiochus to send him "some sweet wine, dried figs and a sophist!" the author says.
Twelfth and thirteenth century documents preserved in the Cairo synagogue mentions about Abraham Yiju, a Jewish merchant from Tunisia who ran a bronze factory on the Malabar Coast where his Indian employees turned copper, tin and old bronze vessels sent from Aden and Spain into new vessels.
Yiju's correspondences along with others offer a picture of a globalised world in which traders took enormous risks in search of profit. The long-distance trade, that has always been synonymous with daring and desire also shape the personal lives of people's in different continents, the book says.
Naryan Murthy is one of the many entrepreneurs who are products as well as promoters of globalisation. He tells Chanda that although he faced great resistance from bureaucrats and material hurdles such as the lack of infrastructure, he recognised the paradigm shift brought about by globalisation.
High speed Internet connections could eliminate the need for "body-shopping" (He and his colleagues would travel to the sites of foreign clients, write codes and return home with cash) . He saw globalisation, he says " as sourcing capital from where it is cheapest, sourcing talent from where it is best available, producing where it is most cost effective and selling where the markets are without being constrained by national boundaries.
Throughout history the increasing integration has provoked resistance from those who were subjected to foreign domination or suffered from the arrival of alien goods or unfamiliar ideas. Today in the media-connected world the impact of globalisation is highly visible. The ranks of those who routinely demonstrate in protest of all international meetings- WTO, World Bank, IMF and G8 summits have swelled by discontented parties from all walks of life.
Chanda has drawn from various authors while compiling the tome. Instead of presenting a linear history of a particular people or territory he has tried to trace the growing connections and interdependence by identifying the main actors -traders, preachers, adventurers and warriors and the goods and ideas they carried and looked at them over a millennial canvas.
The book attempts to show that globalisation stems among other things from a basic human urge to seek a better and a more fulfilling life and that it has been driven by many actors such as traders, preachers, adventurers and warriors.
"By buying what I thought was this 'American' product I had actually become an unwitting participant in globalisation, like millions of consumers around the world," he says. He narrates how the gadget he had bought as a gift for his son had travelled in two days eight thousand miles, the same distance that human ancestors took thousands of years to make from Asian mainland to North America.
He further says the "made in " label did not reveal how many more countries' workers joined in making the iPod. The microdrive that was the heart of the machine was made by Hitachi in Japan , the controller chip was made in South Korea, the Sony battery was assembled in China, the stereo digital-to-analog converter was made by a company in Edinburgh, Scotland, the flash memory chip came from Japan and the software on a chip that allows one to search for and play ten thousand songs was designed by programmers at Portal Player in India.
By buying what I thought was this "American" product, I had actually became an unwitting participant in globalisation like millions of other consumers in the world, says Chanda.
The discovery that all humanity stems from the same common parents came in 1987 when New Zealand biochemist Allan Wilson and his American colleague Rebecca Cann reached the conclusion at the University of California by going down the human family tree of five geographic populations found that all five stemmed from one woman who is postulated to have lived 2,00,000 years ago, probably in Africa.
In the journey from Africa to the rest of the world by our ancestors the arrival to Australia took place in just about five thousand years or seven hundred generations, which some have called as the "Express Train." The news of the 'Express Train' intrigued Chanda who got to pondering about his origins.
He decided to participate in the 'Genographic Project' launched by The National Geographic in 2005 in collaboration with the IBM sought to map the humanity's genetic journey through the ages. By sending DNA swabbed from his cheeks and mailed to the project centre with just a serial number on it he was amazed at the correctness of the analysis.
So who are the globalisers? Chanda says he wanted to understand the origin and transformation of goods and ideas as they travel the world from where they started, looking at the global voyage of commodities and concepts.
The challenge for globalisation he says is to somehow bring into the fold one -third of the world's population that has been left on the wayside by its speeding pace as well as encourage large developing nations such as China and India to carry on with their open-door policies while stanching the rising nationalist and protectionist tide in the developed west.
(About the book- Bound together- How traders, preachers, adventurers and warriors shaped globalisation by Nayan Chanda. Penguin/Viking, Pages, 391, Price Rs 525)