“Proto-globalization” and “Proto-glocalizations” in the Middle Millennium

DIEGO OLSTEIN

As the editors were planning this volume, they hoped that the widely celebrated Israeli sociologist Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (1923-2010) would be able to write the final chapter, because his ideas about the interplay among cultural, political, and social processes of change throughout world history have been so influential.

A possible outline for such an undertaking might portray the core of his historical vision as two major transformations and a long-lasting continuity. In such a schematic view of Eisenstadt's work, the “Axial Age” and “modernization” are the two crucial breakthroughs of world history. Conversely, the “system of empire” that consolidated in the wake of the Axial Age, is the political feature that provided institutional continuity along most of human history until its replacement by the autonomic state - that is, one that is independent from the ruler's patrimony - as modern­ization unfolded.

The Axial Age comprehends a period running from the eighth to the fifth centuries bce, the nearly simultaneous foundational moment of many major intellectual traditions. In China, many philosophical schools emerged during this period, of which Legalism, Daoism, and predominantly Confu­cianism were the most important. In India, Buddhism and Jainism emerged, fostering also the reformulation of Hinduism. In southwest Asia, Zoroas­trianism appeared in Iran as a dualist religion, while Judaism as a monothe­ist religion entered its prophetic phase. In time, Judaism gave rise to Christianity and Islam. In the Mediterranean, Greece witnessed the emergence of rationalistic philosophy.

According to Eisenstadt, all Axial Age traditions institutionalized the division between the mundane and the transcendental orders. This institu­tionalization was represented by the emergence of a new type of social elite, a spiritual leadership that challenged and restrained the already established political elite. Using moral considerations, this new spiritual elite restrained the old political one and demanded accountability from it. This reordering of the world of knowledge, ideas, ideals, and morality also led to the reordering of the political and social spheres, which crystallized in the form of a new political institution, the empire. In Eiscnstadt's view, the system of empire emerged as a political framework capable of achieving territorial centraliza­tion for long periods of time precisely because the goals of the rulers and those of the autonomous social, political, and economic elites were properly balanced. The better balanced these interests were, the longer the empires lived, although the system of empire also required sufficiently complex and productive societies in order to emerge and flourish.

A second dramatic increase in complexity and productivity brought about by modernization displaced both the system of empire and the civilizations of the Axial Age, and resulted in the second major transformation in world history. Industrialization, urbanization, social differentiation, political revolu­tion in thought and praxis, democratization, the emergence of autonomic states, the expansion of the public sphere, and the growing prominence of the civil society are the leading factors that Eisenstadt pointed to as the shapers of a new worldwide modern civilization. For all of the homogenizing force of this new encompassing civilization, however, each of the contrib­uting factors emerged entangled with the singular traditions of the different regional civilizations, resulting in “multiple modernities.”

In his later works, Eisenstadt entwined the unfolding of modernization and the emergence of multiple modernities with the process of “globalization.” For one, he inquired about the interplay between globaliza­tion and modernization by assessing their reciprocal influences.

Within this overall framework the Middle Millennium seems to fall within a long-lasting parenthesis opened by the Axial Age and closed by moderniza­tion, multiple modernities, and globalization. In fact, the Middle Millennium is widely represented in the system of empire by the Chinese, Mongol, Muslim, Byzantine, Carolingian, and Inca Empires. And yet, as Eisenstadt prepared the outline for the present chapter, he advanced the notion of “proto-globalization” and sketched some of its features, thus proposing the Middle Millennium as a prelude to the radical transformations of the second breakthrough of world history. Cultural changes in the Middle Millennium itself may have also brought about a second Axial Age of sorts.

In short, the Middle Millennium appears through the lenses of Eisenstadt's later thinking as one in which the civilizations of the Axial Age enjoyed a new lease on life, the system of empire thrived as never before, and the founda­tions for globalization and modernization were laid. In this spirit, and inspired by Eisenstadt's outline, the following synoptic chapter aims to encapsulate some of the major developments and trends presented in this volume through the lens of Eisentadt's notion of “proto-globalization.”

Although this concept remained undefined in his drafted outline, Eisen- stadt presented proto-globalization as the action of three pervading forces promoting regional integration: religion, commerce, and conquest. In add­ition, he listed four types of movements as capable of furthering interaction between the world's main regions: those of people, animals and plants, goods, and ideas.

As the geographical scope of these three levels concerns only Afro-Eurasia, one way of understanding proto-globalization is as globalization falling short of encompassing the globe. Indeed, rather than a globalized world, the world of the Middle Millennium was one of “worlds together” for Eurasia and the northern half of Africa and “worlds apart” for the rest of the world's societies. In addition to this limitation, and despite all the importance of regional integrations and trans-regional movements, local conditions of social life were fundamental not only for the worlds apart of the western and southern hemispheres but also for the relatively connected societies of Afro-Eurasia. In other words, a complementary way of understanding proto-globalization is as globalization falling short of making global trends prevail upon local ones. These local conditions, therefore, also need to be addressed in a discussion of proto-globalization. Attention to both proto-global and local conditions brings us close to the notion of “proto-glocalization.” Glocaliza- tion, a term invented in the 1980s by Japanese economists and popularized in the 1990s by sociologists to describe adaptation of a global product to local conditions and standards, has more recently been used widely to describe processes that blend globalization and localization. Glocalization stresses the tensions between the local and global origins of - and inputs into - structures and processes in any given society, as well as tensions in the outcomes of such processes.

One way to assess proto-globalization during the Middle Millennium is to follow the changing balance between local structures and processes and regional and trans-regional ones as time passed by. Thus the point of departure for this chapter is a summary of the prevailing local conditions at the beginning of the period, around 500 ce. Then, it focuses on the forces and movements of proto-globalization throughout the period (c. 500-1500 ce). Finally, the chapter assesses the impact of proto-globalization by looking at Middle Millennium societies around the end of the period (c. 1500 ce). In doing that, this chapter relies on the vantage points provided by the twenty- four chapters of this volume.

The local

As the Middle Millennium opened up c. 500 ce, the world was made of an immense variety of little worlds, usually unrelated. Each of these worlds consisted of societies differentiated by their family structure, education, religion, law, and government. Deeply embedded patterns of marriage, child-raising, living arrangements (patrilocality, matrilocality or neolocality), kinship, and kinship-like ties distinguished societies from one another. Idio­syncrasy also predominated in education as these singular family and house­hold arrangements also functioned as primary educational institutions: mothers taught daughters the skills that women were expected to possess, and fathers taught sons. Also formal education, provided by institutions that resulted from particular local combinations of religious and intellectual traditions, as well as by social, political, and economic structures, was essentially local. Local customary patterns of instruction prevailed, transmit­ted in both written and oral forms, as well as through practice.

Beyond close-kin relations, most people probably felt most solidarity with their local communities. Solidarities evolved within the relatively small polities of nomadic societies, among neighbors in settled agricultural soci­eties, and within towns.

The prominence of the local is certainly true for the rule of law. The legal departing point for most societies was some kind of unwritten customary law. Because it was unwritten it tended to vary, even within one polity, from place to place and from time to time. For example, rules about such matters as inheritance and the use of land varied among societies and among classes of people within them, and were variably enforced. Similarly local were religious customs, as societies probably started out with their own belief systems and practices. These local belief systems and practices were later influenced by the religions of those societies with which they came into contact, or were even partially displaced by the religion of central polities. Still, such displacements resulted in syncretistic beliefs and practices that blended impositions from the outside and local elements.

Despite these local differences, some crucial social features were similar in all societies during the Middle Millennium. Those for which there are records all seem to have been more or less unequal. The least unequal, with the fewest layers of government, were the smallest and poorest: pastoral nomads or hunter-gatherers, with little or no agriculture. Societies based on agriculture had larger populations, greater wealth, greater inequality and power, greater complexity of government, and therefore more cause for conflict both within societies and between them. In this type of society land remained the chief source of wealth, status, and power, so that the largest landowners remained the top elite. Out of this landowning class came the rulers of localities, regions, and polities. Some kind of monarchy was the norm.

Moreover, not only similar underlying features bring these varied local worlds together, but also actual contacts between them. Increased produc­tion promoted markets, towns, and trade, both local and long-distance, and with this came more development of more crafts, more movement and mixing of people, both in space and status, as well as movement of goods, both everyday and luxury items. Long-distance trade, though, was just one of the main ways through which wider contacts impacted the local worlds. Together trade, the diffusion of religions, and conquests represented the forces of ‘proto-globalization.'

The “proto-global” forces

The Middle Millennium opened with a series of shifts in relative wealth and power within Afro-Eurasia. First, pastoralist nomadic societies conquered and extracted wealth from agricultural ones. Second, among the latter, India and West Asia prospered while Europe and China declined. There is a connection between these two shifts. The military might of the Sasanian Empire (226-651 ce) was able to restrain the expansion of raiders from the pastoral societies of the steppes of Asia, thus enabling political stability and continuity in West Asia while at the same time the Roman and Han empires collapsed. Third, these imperial collapses brought about political fragmenta­tion and trade decay. Fourth, the power vacuum created by political frag­mentation was filled in by the spread of universal religions, as the political power vacuum allowed religions to spread more widely, and as religious institutions substituted for secular political ones as the means by which power was organized. Christianity continued to expand, and from India Buddhism spread to Southeast and Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan. A century and a half later, with the advent of Islam a new universal religion as well as a new civilization came to the fore, ultimately reaching the Atlantic shores westward and the Pacific Ocean eastward. Indeed, the spread of agriculture, city dwelling, and state formation to vast new areas of Afro- Eurasia is the fifth outstanding development highlighting this period. On the western end of Eurasia forest and swamp were transformed into arable land. In East and South Asia floodplains were transformed into rice paddy fields that provided the material base for the consolidation of a unified Korea under the Silla dynasty (618-935), the Yamoto state in Japan (538-710), and the emergence of new states in the main river valleys of Southeast Asia.

These five developments set the stage for the “proto-global” dimension of the Middle Millennium, the irruption of outside forces that transformed the local worlds in Afro-Eurasia. There were three major such forces: empire building, the expansion of trade networks, and religious conversion. Although these political, economic, and ideological developments operated independently, they also appeared sometimes in pairs or as an entangled triad. Sometimes empire building fostered commercial integration and reli­gious conversion, but the establishment of trade networks and the spread of religions also unfolded outside imperial contexts, sometimes entangled with one another. Along with these three, other factors also shaped local worlds, including migration, and the diffusion of languages, knowledge, and technology.

The expansion of Islam exemplifies the intertwining of empire construc­tion, the establishment of trade networks, and religious conversion. The Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries initially resulted in a huge empire. This fragmented in the tenth century, but even after its fragmentation the political units of the Islamic world were larger than those in place before Islamic expansion. These political transformations were associated with processes of Islamization and Arabization, as Islam and, to a lesser extent, the Arabic language were disseminated in the conquered lands. Manifold local worlds were absorbed within the realm of Islam, as local traditions became displaced or entangled with the external forces brought by Islam. Moreover, the geographic expansion of Islam from Iberia to India and from Morocco to Southeast Asia resulted in the establishment of a corridor directly connecting the Asian far east and the European far west. Islam also spread through the Indian Ocean long-distance trade routes, and had an impact throughout this ocean basin from the shores of East Africa to the ports of southern China. This combination of large political units and maritime networks facilitated the articulation of contacts between faraway societies via trade interactions through which technologies and ideas also flowed. The challenge to local traditions extended beyond the lands that were politically part of the Islamic world or in which Islam was the dominant religion. Islam was, instead, truly a Afro-Eurasian proto-global phenomenon.

The diffusion of Buddhism was also initially associated with empire building, but this was before the Middle Millennium, during the Maurgan Empire of the second century bce and the Kushan Empire of the first century ce. During the Kushan period, Mahayana Buddhists began to develop their unique philosophical tradition, texts, and images, which later spread to Central Asia, China, Japan, and Korea. The Theravada variety of Buddhism became dominant in Sri Lanka and most of Southeast Asia. During the Middle Millennium, these consolidated centers of Buddhism exchanged teachings, texts, and images. Religious exchanges were frequently inter­twined with commercial activity, as trade routes were their vehicle and itinerant traders and merchants were their agents. Networks of Buddhism and trade overlapped and were interdependent, and they flowed in all directions. Buddhist monks from India, for example, went to China not only to transmit the doctrine, but also to pay homage to Buddhist divinities purportedly living in Chinese mountains. Similarly, ideas formulated in Japan seem to have influenced Buddhist schools in China, although these Chinese schools are also considered to be the main source of Buddhism in Japan. The spread of Buddhism included a process through which Buddhist ideas were transmitted back to places recognized as the central realms of Buddhism.

Linked to these Buddhist networks were many other types of cross- cultural exchanges, including diplomatic relations between various courts and kingdoms, the transmission of scientific and technological knowledge, and borrowings in art, literature, and music. Thus, the spread of Buddhism must be understood as a multifaceted and dynamic process of cross-cultural interactions and influences. Bonds were tighter within areas that practiced similar varieties of Buddhism: Mahayana Buddhists had their own sphere of influence radiating from China into East Asia while Theravada Buddhists in southern Asia maintained close relationships with Tibet. Despite the diver­gence between the Mahayana and Theravada forms of Buddhism, however, Buddhist interactions between China and southern Asia continued through­out the Middle Millennium. The exchange of monks, the translation of Indian Buddhist texts into Chinese, and the import of Buddhist artifacts from southern Asia reached unprecedented levels under the Song dynasty (960-1279). Buddhist interactions between China and southern Asia con­tinued during the Mongol Yuan dynasty, albeit with less intensity.

The Mongol expansion in the thirteenth century was also an instance of empire building entwined with the thickening of trade relations, although without the dissemination of the conquerors' religion. Instead, their expan­sion resulted in their own conversion to either Islam or Buddhism. The emergence of the Mongol Empire, the largest continental empire the world has ever seen, was the culmination of a proto-globalizing phenomenon that recurred throughout the Middle Millennium: pastoralist nomadic migrations and conquests. In fact, because at the beginning of this period there were already no unutilized and unclaimed pastures anywhere in Eurasia, the Middle Millennium stands out as a period of large-scale pastoralist nomadic migrations and conquests. This pattern unfolded for the first time between the second half of the sixth century and the middle of the eighth century. In this period, Turkic peoples subjugated many oasis states in Central Asia and established Turkic khaqanates. These conquests resulted in the spreading of Turkic languages from East Siberia to the Middle Volga region and to the Balkans, a Turkification that was the counterpart to the Arabization pro­duced by the Islamic conquests. During the Qarakhanid period in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, nomads migrated into and settled in the agricultural areas of Central Asia in considerably larger numbers than they had previously. These waves of nomadic migrations and conquests shaped manifold local worlds because trade, migrations, information flows, and cross-cultural contacts accompanied them. Even when they did not result in the formation of new empires, nomadic conquests were a major challenge for existing empires. In the western end of their reach, the extension, nature, and fate of the Byzantine Empire fluctuated according to the threats posed by nomadic societies. In the eastern end, nomadic challenges made major imprints on the political history of China.

The Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century was part of the recurrent waves of pastoral nomadic migration and conquest. It represented not only the final and largest wave, however, but also a transition from mediated to direct rule. In contrast to earlier steppe empires that were usually adminis­tered indirectly through local elites, Mongol rule was generally direct. It relied on mobile secretariats appointed by a central government and depending upon a mounted postal courier system. Under Mongol auspices various commodities, technologies, and knowledge, as well as human, animal, and plant populations were disseminated across Eurasia. For instance, the Mongols promoted the transfer of those branches of knowledge in which they were interested, such as medicine (i.e. healing), astronomy and divination (reading of heaven), geography and cartography (reading of earth). Similarly, numerous skilled professionals and specialists were transferred across the empire to provide for its needs.

Because the nomadic empires brought political stability and transportation facilities to Central Asia, overland trade flourished along the Silk Roads during the Middle Millennium. Moreover, nomadic states stimulated trade though increased demand for luxury commodities and prestige goods, and they were the main suppliers of slaves to their sedentary counterparts. Conversely, the collapse of nomadic empires resulted in the decline of Eurasian trade.

Once again, the Mongol Empire is the best example of this overall trend. As Mongol expansion paved the way to political consolidation and as taxation replaced booty, trade was privileged; its pace accelerated and its scope enlarged. Most of Afro-Eurasia was virtually connected by means of overland and maritime routes, as well as the intertwining of these: from the ports of South China to Southeast Asia and India, and from there to the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea; by land route to West Asia and Europe; or from Aden to the shores of East Africa. Merchants from Southeast Asia, India, the Muslim world, and Europe were all part of this global trade network, with the key non-Mongol players the Indian kingdoms and the Italian city-states.

Along with the spread of religions and empire building, trade was the third trans-regional process penetrating the fabrics of local societies. In this regard as well, the Afro-Eurasian world was a very different place in 1500 ce than it had been in 500 ce. A more professional merchant class moved larger cargoes of more varied commodities over longer distances to more destinations serving a wider consumer base than could have been imagined at the close of the fifth century. Although most trade took place on the local and regional levels, trans-regional linkages had become stronger as the Afro-Eurasian world slowly drew together. Towards the second part of the middle millen­nium, China focused more and more on maritime outlets leading into the Indian Ocean. India's trade routes pointed in many directions. Going east­ward, they led from the Coromandel Coast to Southeast Asia and from there to China. Going westward, they led from the Malabar Coast to the realm of Islam. The realm of Islam was itself the great Afro-Eurasian trade nexus by both sea and land, reaching as far as West Africa through camel caravans. The Silk and Steppe Roads systems provided more overland routes, connect­ing trade from the north to the Indian complex, and providing a direct link from China to Persia through the Black Sea and from there to the Russian river system and the Mediterranean Sea.

Trade provided many benefits, but also created problems. Along with goods and ideas, disease traveled along trade routes. One dramatic example of this was the plague pandemic of the fourteenth century, which apparently traveled on the trade routes of the Mongol Empire across Asia to Europe and Africa. Combined with economic and political problems, plague led to a decline in overland trade, so that by the early fifteenth century the Steppe Road was permanently defunct, the Silk Roads resumed their long decline, and the Trans-Sahara caravan trail lost most of its inter-regional importance. Thus, by the end of this period, maritime routes were becoming even more important than they had been earlier. Technological innovations allowed larger ships to travel more safely in shorter times than ever before, which made maritime travel more cost-effective. Until the twelfth century, advances in navigation and maritime technology are primarily attributed to the Arabs, Indians, and Malays. After that, the Chinese took the lead; they introduced the magnetic compass, watertight bulkheads, fore-and-aft rigging, and ships employing five or more mainmasts, steered by rudders up to fifty feet in length, and they greatly enhanced the seaworthiness of their ships by using iron nails instead of coir. The growth of maritime traffic was a favorable trend for Europe, perched at the far end of Eurasia with a coastline far out of proportion to its interior, and the Italians took the lead in the Mediterranean and Black Sea from the twelfth century on.

Empire building, religious conversion, and trade networks were the three forces of inter-regional integration during the Middle Millennium. None of these forces was new. The unification of China by a short-lived dynasty (Sui, 589-618), successfully succeeded by a long lasting one (Tang, 618-907), is reminiscent of the original unification (Qin, 221-206 bce /Han, 206 BCE-220 ce). And nomadic empires had emerged in the steppes of Inner or Central Asia before 500. But certain aspects of these political developments were very different to earlier examples. The reach of the short-lived Mongol Empire was unprecedented, and the emergence, expansion, and consolida­tion of the Muslim Empire was an even more dramatic change. Not only was the Islamic world large, but it shared borders with all other regions of Afro-Eurasia.

Along with being a new type of empire, Islam was also a new religion in the Middle Millennium. Buddhism had emerged about a thousand years earlier, and its spread into Central, East and Southeast Asia had begun long before the Middle Millennium. What was new in this period was the reinvigoration of its diffusion to a re-unified China and from there to the new polities in Korea and Japan. The situation of Christianity is rather similar to that of Buddhism: it began before the Middle Millennium and was already widely disseminated by 500. A major distinction, though, is that during the Middle Millennium Christianity doubled its geographical scope. Christianity became the hegemonic religion in Europe, in a successful missionary effort that was tightly connected with empire and state-building. In lands far afield from Christian states, such as southern India, Malaya, Central Asia, and China, missions were associated with trade activity. Although in terms of numbers of converts their degree of success was very modest, the range of Christian expansion in the Middle Millennium represents a major innovation in terms of religious diffusion. Nevertheless, the ultimate religious innov­ation of the age, as was the case for empire building, is the rise of Islam.

As for the third driving force of trans-regional integration, trade networks, none of the major webs - the Silk and Steppe Roads, the North African caravans, or the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea routes - were new. They had entered a phase of decline at the beginning of the Middle Millen­nium, however, then recovered and became more tightly connected until the outbreak of the Black Death.

“Proto-glocal”: Afro-Eurasian integration forces on the local scene

At the beginning of the Middle Millennium the political situation of most of Afro-Eurasia was one of fragmentation. The large empires of the previous era had disappeared, devolving political power to numerous smaller entities. Together with these empires trans-regional trade networks had also declined. Under these conditions, in both Afro-Eurasia and the rest of the world, local norms and patterns mattered the most in defining life arrangements and conditions. This continued in the Middle Millennium, but the new wave of empire building, interrelated with commercial revival and religious conver­sion sketched above, also made major imprints in local conditions in such areas as family structure, education, law, and government.

Islamic conquests introduced the Quran and shari‘a law, and the process of Islamization resulted in their dissemination. These developments trans­formed the structures of family life. For example, on the one hand Islam contributed to the protection of women by specifying a marriage gift to a wife (mahr). By the end of the Middle Millennium in East African societies, where conversion was often achieved through trade rather than conquest, shari‘a introduced a dower paid to a wife by contract and in Muslim Spain a marriage contract included a similar dower. These practices persisted throughout Islam and women were understood to embody the honor of the family. On the other hand, Islam favored the subordination of women as expressed by veiling and seclusion, and it allowed polygyny, although it did limit the number of wives a man could have to four, and specified that he was to treat them equitably. Islam failed to eliminate all regional differences in its wide reach, however. In many places, especially among rural residents, women and girls worked outside of the home as a matter of course and ‘urf, or exigent custom, structured family life along with religious law throughout Islam. Family life in the lands of Islam was, then, a result of “proto-glocal” tension.

The Mongol expansion also brought proto-glocal tensions as Mongol social norms penetrated their subjects' lives. For instance, levirate marriages (in which a widow married her husband's brother) were condemned by both Islamic law and Confucian ethics, but were not rare in Ilkhanid Iran and Yuan China. Similarly, following in the footsteps of their Mongol counterparts, Persian and Korean princesses attained an elevated status and became intimately involved in politics.

Other proto-global tensions transformed family lives all across Afro-Eurasia as exogenous factors made their varied impact upon local arrangements. War, conflict, and invasions constituted threats that often led to subordinating women through a more pronounced emphasis on gender difference; the spread of Confucianism and other hierarchical ideologies did so as well. In general, gender systems moved from somewhat diverse and flexible to more rigid in this era. Patriarchal institutions dominated, and in some places by the end of the era became more hierarchical among men - favoring wealth and advanced age - as well as between men and women. Around the world marriage had become more monogamous, which meant that married couples were more responsible themselves for providing care for elderly parents and investment in their offspring's welfare, which might include marriage gifts for daughters and some type of inheritance for all sons at the death of a father.

All across Afro-Eurasia the shape of education was transformed by the spread of Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity. Confucian ideas began to spread to Korea before the Middle Millennium with the Han occupation of the northern part of the Korean peninsula (c. 100 bce- 400 ce). This intensified when the Silla dynasty unified the peninsula in 668 and modeled their state structure on that of Tang China (618-907). In 682, they also established a Confucian Academy in the capital, Kyongju, for the education of officials. Later on, the cultural exchange between China and Korea facilitated by the Mongol conquest even resulted in an increasing number of Korean students passing the Chinese civil service examinations in Beijing. In 1314 Ch'ungson abdicated the throne in favor of his son and retired to Beijing, where he founded a large library that became a meeting place for Korean and Chinese scholars to discuss Neo-Confucianism. Bud­dhism, well established in Tang China, was another dominant cultural and ideological influence flowing from China to Korea, one of the many examples of the spread of Buddhist teachings and educational institutions throughout South, East, and Southeast Asia.

The flourishing institutions of Buddhist education throughout South, East, and Southeast Asia represented a unifying force coming from the outside and bringing both religious and secular education. For a polity and culture that was already unified, such as China, this meant an additional layer of unity. Conversely, for a region like Southeast Asia, with its large variety of cultures, peoples, and states, Buddhist education brought some unity to a varied local landscape. Central to this process of educational diffusion were some centers of Buddhist learning with trans-regional projections, the most famous of which was founded at Nalanda (Bihar, India) probably in the mid-fifth century. Another major center in Vikramasila (also in Bihar) housed 160 scholars and 5,000 ordained monks maintained by royal patronage beginning in the eighth century. These centers that set in motion the trans- regional spread of Buddhism were displaced by another trans-regional devel­opment in the early thirteenth century, however, when they were razed with the Muslim conquest of Bihar.

Muslim conquests were followed by the establishment of educational institutions for the transmission of religious knowledge: the maktab or kuttab (a “place of writing” that arose in the seventh century ce to provide elementary education), the mosque, and the madrasa (place of study). The emergence of these institutions coming from the outside contended with local educational practices. For example, the exclusivity that the griot (West African bard) had for the transmission of learning, understood as the know­ledge a society had of itself and its past, ended with the establishment of Muslim educational institutions. And yet, as elsewhere, local traditions clearly prevailed in the domestic sphere with the acquisition of skills neces­sary for the sustenance and survival of the community transmitted through family lines as done before for generations.

These proto-global tensions are also observed in Europe. To the fragmen­tation of educational practices following the collapse of the Roman Empire, the spread of Christianity subsequently provided the unifying context for the development of educational institutions. Singular to Europe, though, is the development of universities as corporations with well-defined rights and duties.

The restructuring of family relations and education because of trans- regional influences contributed to the reshaping of some aspects of social life. Moreover, for all the local idiosyncrasy of social life some features were apparently shared globally. The assumption of political and social inequalities was pervasive in all societies. Most people seem to have taken their inequal­ity for granted and regarded it as just, as long as those above them treated them according to their society's ideas of justice. Moreover, inequality was not at all incompatible with consultation and hierarchy seems to have imposed duties, however often unfulfilled, on the people at the top. Hierarchies came in different shapes and layers, while as a rule smaller and poorer societies were less unequal. The richer and more complex societies of this period were liable to have more conflicts of interest between economic (and political) classes.

The creation of courts across Eurasia also entailed “glocal” tensions. On the one hand, everywhere courts developed, based upon local traditions. Courts in China relied upon Chinese Han court traditions. Roman imperial courts set the model for the Byzantine court and the papal court. On the other hand, these local models reached new areas, as in the adoption of the Chinese Han model by the Japanese from c. 500, or the embracing of the Roman model by the Germanic kingdoms. Moreover, in the case of Islamic courts we observe a truly inter-regional synthesis as both Roman and Sasanian traditions were at its base. Finally, as local courts developed around local power centers emulating the central courts, regional and inter-regional diffusion further penetrated the local scene.

Also economic life was mostly locally based by the beginning of the period in terms of production, consumption, and even in terms of trade. However, as the Middle Millennium progressed, commodities found their way increasingly from one end of Afro-Eurasia to the other. European cotton textiles, Chinese porcelain, Southeast Asian pepper and spices, Arabian perfume, Mediterranean glassware, Persian and Central Asian horses, and in many regions slaves, were among the most traded commod­ities. Certainly, this trans-regional trade was mostly one for luxuries, but this did not mean it had only a marginal impact on local economies. The shape of local economies was determined to a large extent by local elites willing to consume these luxuries brought through trans-regional trade as symbols of power and status. Some non-luxury items, such as food and cloth as well as medicine and entertainment, also found their way into trans-regional trade. Diffusion of these items by trade was amplified when their production was imitated locally, thus enhancing their consumption. That was the case, for example, with “Tatar dress,” rugs and tapestries, and pasta. Trans-regional trade also resulted in the adoption of silver across most of Eurasia as the standard unit for pricing transactions, even when they were paid by other means. In fact, the period spanning the 1280s and 1360s witnessed a sharp rise in the use of silver from England to Bengal and North Africa.

The Mongols were also decisive in bringing about a global cartographic turn. Aiming to consolidate their rule of their huge domains and looking even beyond, the Mongols relied on Islamic maps and Muslim scholars, who launched vast cartographic projects. These projects paved the way to the drawing of a world map in Korea in 1402, which cartographers see as part of a transition from ethnocentric to global cartography. This transition was also evident in the drawing of world maps in Byzantium and western Europe around 1300 as the Pax Mongolica enabled Western travelers to report on their Eurasian voyages. Marco Polo's accounts enabled the preparation of the Catalan Atlas. Other accounts by travelers, such as those of Benjamin of Tudela, Ibn Jubayr, Ibn Battuta, and Wang Dayuan, as well as of pilgrims, returning prisoners of war, and merchants provided descriptions of far-away countries. Despite the growing amount of information on other societies, however, the Middle Millennium witnessed just one attempt at proto-global historiography, the Compendium of Chronicles by Rashid al-Din. Otherwise, writing on the past was locally framed or, at the most, encompassed within the writer's own civilizational framework.

Other forms of scientific and technological knowledge were transmitted by practitioners, diplomatic exchanges, translations, and artifacts. There are well-documented processes of scientific transmission along certain tracks within the Afro-Eurasian realm, such as the transmission of astronomical knowledge from Sindh and Hind to Baghdad or that of pharmacological knowledge traveling from Constantinople to Cordova. More ambitious processes of transmission covering a huge chunk of Afro-Eurasia are hypothesized, such as the scholastic method presumably formulated among Buddhists in Central Asia being carried into Islamic madrasas, and finally spreading to western Europe. Regardless of means and scale, all transmis­sions of scientific knowledge entailed tensions between the local and the proto-global as translation, interpretation, and framing added local compon­ents to external formulations. Occasionally proto-glocalization also took another form when local and foreign bodies of knowledge coexisted. Medi­cine in South Asia represents a case in point. There Ayurvedic medicine, associated with local Buddhist and Hindu traditions, existed side-by-side with ancient Greek (Unani) medicine, transmitted by Muslim intermediaries.

Technologies for civil and military purposes, daily life, and the production of luxuries were also transferred across Afro-Eurasia. Hydraulic technologies, irrigation systems, and gunpowder artillery exemplify this trend. The pro­cesses by which new technologies were adopted and adapted were predom­inantly local, however. New developments often lingered for a while before

they took root and became widespread in an area, or they were even invented several times. Whether it was adopted, adapted, or rejected, innov­ation from the outside was always in tension with the local conditions in which peopled lived.

Processes of transmission were facilitated by go-between populations that emerged as proto-global interactions unfolded. A case in point is that of the local Christian populations that fell under Muslim rule. From Persia to Iberia, Muslim conquests brought Christians under Muslim rule as protected people (dhimmi). Since Christian communities retained many of the cultural attri­butes of their pre-Islamic life, they offered traditions, local knowledge, and administrative experience to the Muslim rulers. Simultaneously, their own Arabization positioned them as cultural bridges between the realm of Islam and their original civilizational sphere.

The transmission of manifold branches of knowledge unfolded during the Middle Millennium amidst “Ecumenical Renaissances,” a reassertion by Eurasian societies in the tenth to the thirteenth centuries of their cultural legacies. This reassertion was associated with the strengthening of the clerical elites, although the growth of their degree of autonomy also represented a challenge to the political elites, whose exclusivity in the political arena was brought into question. Moreover, with this challenge posed by clerical elites underway, additional social groups also attempted a degree of power­sharing. This dynamic is reminiscent of that of the Axial Age as defined by Eisenstadt. The late Eisenstadt, for his part, identified the Middle Millennium as the age of proto-globalization.

Conclusions

The pre-modern world was also a pre-global one, for globalization requires the encompassing of the globe and its articulation in a way that local societies are significantly transformed by developments radiating from that articula­tion. This is neither the geographical scope nor the degree of interdepend­ence reached during the Middle Millennium. Geographically speaking, the world of the Middle Millennium was one of worlds together in northern Africa and Eurasia but worlds apart in the western and southern hemi­spheres. In terms of intensity, interdependence was not structured on a permanent basis but was rather an intermittent situation.

The worlds apart westward across the Atlantic Ocean underwent import­ant transformations during the Middle Millennium. In Mesoamerica, Maya civilization was at its height in what archaeologists term the Classic period (c. 250-900 ce), as were other societies, including those centered on the cities of Teotihuacan and Monte Alban. During the eighth and ninth centuries, many Maya cities were abandoned, building stopped, and inscriptions ended in what has been called the Classic Maya collapse. Many cities throughout Mesoamerica that had been important in the Classic period shrank in size and power. In the succeeding Postclassic period (c. 900-1520), a series of processes transformed the region. They include: the proliferation of small polities, new forms of writing and iconography, new patterns of stylistic interaction, commercialization of the economy, and greater diversity of trade goods. Population grew again, so that it was higher in 1500 than it had been in 1000. The expansion of commerce was one of the most significant trends, allowing the diverse cultures and societies of Mesoamerica to become more closely connected than they had ever been. Moreover, merchants or other voyagers brought Meso- and South America into contact along the Pacific coast. This linkage enabled the transmission of the technology for smelting bronze into west Mexico from South America, and may have involved other trade goods or technologies as well. In South America, conquest was the major driving force leading towards regional integration. The Inca Empire established the largest imperial state of pre-Columbian America.

Trade and conquest, then, were driving forces of integration in the New as in the Old World. Religion was as well. All Postclassic Mesoamerican cities included large temple-pyramids of the state religion as well as royal palaces and markets. In the Inca Empire, the cult of the Inca Sun became increasingly prominent as conquests generated theoretical and religious reconceptualiza­tion of the Inca ruler's power and position in relation to other lords. Diverse existing cults were reorganized within the Inca religious framework and empire-wide pilgrimage centers were established, where sacred history enshrined in ritual imparted legitimacy on the Inca conquest. Whether incorporation into the Inca realm was achieved by conquest or diplomacy, it entailed participation in Inca religion, and the Inca ruler's participation in the religion of his subjects.

To the comparability of these integrative forces, that of periodization and sequencing could be added. In both Mesoamerica and Afro-Eurasia the early part of the Middle Millennium saw the collapse of the largest political entities, political fragmentation, and decline in trade. Subsequently, these trends were reversed in both hemispheres with population growth, the emergence of new polities, and commercialization at the core of these transformations. However, and most crucially, for all their potential compar­ability, the hemispheres remained worlds apart.

Even while looking at the worlds together of northern Africa and Eurasia this world was composed by manifold little idiosyncratic worlds, which were not articulated into an interdependent whole. Nevertheless, very many of them became entangled throughout the Middle Millennium through a series of large-scale transformations whose epicentres could have originated thou­sands of miles apart. These transformations were the emergence and expan­sion of Islam, the diffusion of Buddhism and Christianity, the Mongol conquests, and the tightening of commercial webs. Most aspects of local life were touched to different degrees by these forces. Family life was impacted throughout Afro-Eurasia by the introduction of the shari‘a law, the diffusion of Buddhism and Christianity, and the practice of Mongol social norms. Religious institutions also radically transformed the field of education. Econ­omies were impacted by the arrival of new plants, new technologies, and commodities. In the political field, besides fluctuations in power distribution, the courts - central and local - adopted styles and habits from counterparts abroad. Exposure to other societies and cultures and acquaintance with their scholarly achievements increased noticeably.

It is in view of this combination of limiting conditions for a globalized world and the presence of such powerful forces that permeated so many local lives that Eiscnstadt's quest for a proto-global Middle Millennium makes full sense. Eisenstadt's outline of a proto-global world was partially matched by a growth of proto-global consciousness in the Middle Millen­nium itself, reflected in cartographical innovation and interest in travelers' accounts. Eisenstadt has also not been alone among recent scholars in highlighting the growing connectedness of this era. His idea of a proto- global Middle Millennium echoes Marshall Hodgson's description of Afro- Eurasia as an Oikoumene linked by the corridor established by Islam, Janet Abu-Lughod's emphasis on eight commercial circuits between the Atlantic and the Pacific under the Pax Mongolica, and Jerry Bentley's highlighting of distinctive patterns of cross-cultural encounters that transformed Asia and Europe during this period.

Other scholars do not agree. For A. G. Hopkins, proto-globalization was the two-century-long threshold that began with the process of encompassing the globe and its articulation into a single unit starting in the sixteenth century. It involved the simultaneous growth of pre-industrial manufactur­ing, financing, services, and markets combined with the strengthening of political entities, taxation and sovereignty that resulted in the enhancements of circuits of exchange on a planetary scale. This is the proto-globalization that paved the way for the “modern globalization” of the nineteenth century characterized by industrialization, nation-state formation, a global integration of producers of raw materials and manufacturing centers, faster and cheaper communication and transportation, and price convergence. For many other authors, however, the combination of the “Columbian” and “Magellan” exchanges in the sixteenth century, epitomized by the launching of Manila as a trans-oceanic entrepot, already represents full-fledged globalization. And if so, then the Middle Millennium’s proto-globalization represents its threshold.

Whatever the preferred periodization and conceptualizations are, the questions remain: How does the proto-globalization of the Middle Millen­nium inform the history of globalization? Are there developments coming from the Middle Millennium’s proto-globalization that opened early path dependence or other developments that conditioned later globalization, whether of the nineteenth century or today? These are open-ended questions to be answered in subsequent volumes of this series, indispensable for establishing links and contrasts between the periods, and possibly warranting a further quest for continuities and changes.