The Great Convergence
Our present age seems the polar opposite of the long, slow age of divergence. Interaction, integration, and innovation occur with breathtaking speed. Fast, quick communication and transportation blur cultural boundaries.
Trade and travel, infrastructure integration, and alliances diminish the significance of political and economic boundaries. Although conflicts still erupt, the level of violence in the world appears to be declining.[148] [149] The number of spoken languages has also declined, as national and regional languages have gained importance. For the first time in history, one language, English, has emerged as the global language.11 The age of globalization is both awesome and terrifying. On the positive side, globalizing forces have raised living standards, spread powerful new technologies, and promoted international and transnational cooperation. On the negative side, people fear the loss of traditional customs, global competition for resources and markets risks promoting global conflict, and rising consumption is causing such severe threats to the global environment that, in the worst scenarios, human progress and humanity itself may be at risk. For better and/or worse, globalization seems here to stay.Historians aren't able to predict where globalization will take the planet, but we can provide useful perspectives on its origins, even though a consensus about when globalization began seems elusive. Many social scientists describe globalization as a new phenomenon that came into existence toward the end of the twentieth century, but most will concede that it has roots going back to the period after 1945 that saw the formation of the United Nations, the expansion of international trade, and the emergence of what V. S. Naipaul in 1990 called “universal civilization.” Other scholars see a longer trajectory.
Many economists are inclined to place the origins of globalization in the Industrial Revolution.[150] Not surprisingly, world historians who have bothered to look are inclined to place the beginnings earlier. Tony Hopkins has usefully identified several periods of globalization: “archaic” (encompassing trends in the Old World continents up to about 1600), “proto” (associated with the expansion of political, financial, and commercial systems between 1600 and 1800), and “modern” (beginning with industrialization). Others give greater attention to European maritime expansion or consolidation in Asia.[151]One can sidestep some of these issues by not extending the term globalization too far back and using global “convergence” instead, as this chapter does. Convergence includes many of the same phenomena as globalization (political integration and cooperation, economic and cultural integration, movement of people and ideas, etc.), but allows the term “globalization” to be used just for the intense integration of recent times. Convergent forces seem to be as old as divergent ones. Historian William H. McNeill writes, “human societies [have] always exchanged messages with strangers and altered their behavior every so often when something new and attractive came along.”[152] Gregarious by nature, humans belong to groups based on kinship, community, and other social and economic associations. People within groups share and borrow. Borrowing among groups also occurs whether freely or through raids, theft, and kidnapping. The most common type of exchanges has been through trade, the earliest forms of which reflected different environments and lifeways. Pastoralists exchanged milk and hides for grain with farmers. Salt is the earliest item known to have been traded over long distances, because all humans need salt for health.[153]
Historians have long identified the political centralization in the Nile and Indus Valleys, China, and Mesopotamia during the first millennium bce as a break with the past, which indeed it was.
Empires united people on a new scale, promoted trade in luxury goods for the royal courts and elite classes, and fostered cultural uniformity. For example, records from ancient Egypt and ancient Israel tell of trading expeditions south into Africa to get animal pelts, rare woods, spices and aromatics, and, of course, gold. Over time, longdistance trade expanded its markets. A shipwreck offJava dated to about 1000 ce contained tons of Malay tin, glass beads from the Southeast Asian mainland, Chinese silver and iron ingots, and ceramics from China and Persia. It had probably also carried Indian cotton textiles and Chinese silks that did not survive under water.[154] This complex cargo documents the existence of communities mining and manufacturing for export as well as professional trading communities.Long-distance trade was connected to two other convergent cultural trends. The first was the spread of trading languages. Ancient sources tell of people who had to trade through silent barter, piling up goods on each side until both traders agreed to the exchange. However, verbally bargaining was more expeditious. In antiquity, for example, Koine Greek was used widely as a trading language. In the thirteenth century Marco Polo was able to converse in Persian as he crossed the vastness of Central Asia on his way to China. Arabic also spread across the western Indian Ocean as an important language of trade, turning that body of water into an Arabian Sea. In the eastern Indian Ocean, about 1500, the trading state of Malacca had official linguists to deal with the dozens of languages spoken by foreign merchants who came there. Generally, trading languages were acquired as second languages and did not displace local vernaculars. Over time, however, they became some people's first language, as is the case with Arabic in much of the Middle East.
The development of trans-regional religions was another form of cultural convergence often spread along trade routes.
Jewish traders dispersed to Persia, western India, and along the Silk Road to the Far East. Indian traders introduced Hinduism into Southeast Asia. Even earlier, Buddhism had spread from India into South Asia, along the maritime trade routes of the Indian Ocean and overland into the Middle East, and along the Silk Road. Judaism and Hinduism largely kept their ethnic base, while Buddhism transcended its origins. After some initial hesitation, Christianity and Islam also embraced universalism. Christianity spread within the Roman empire and outward along trade routes, a notable example being the Nestorian Christian communities along the Silk Road. Islam was spread by conquest and Arab settlement in the Middle East, North Africa, and Iberia and through trading connections in the Indian Ocean, across the Sahara, and in Central Asia. By about 1000, for example, gold and slaves flowed out of sub-Saharan Africa into the Muslim world, while horses and other goods, along with Islam and the Arabic language moved into lands south of the Sahara and along the Swahili Coast.At some point, centrifugal forces for global divergence began to be overtaken by centripetal forces for convergence. Despite some interruptions, that trend continued and gradually gained momentum. This was the Great Convergence. The tipping point need not have been sudden or associated with any dramatic event and people living at the time need not have been aware of the transition. Only with the value of hindsight might people notice that a shift had taken place. Even if dating when this shift occurred is possible, doing so may seem to be of purely academic interest. Yet working out when and how the convergent forces became dominant is of great significance to those who seek to make sense of human history.
One place to start the quest for that tipping point is with the big surveys. Most world history textbooks come in two volumes, the first of which almost invariably ends in 1500, the conventional round number for dividing medieval and modern history.
However, textbook authors often hedge their bets (and broaden their appeal) by beginning the second volume a few centuries earlier. For example, the second volume of Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's The World: A History (2007) ostensibly starts in 1300, but the first chapter in that volume actually begins nearly a century earlier with the Mongol conquests and the great expansion of trade overland along the Silk Road. David Christian starts his Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History much earlier in time, devoting the first five chapters to the origins of the universe and the evolution of life with a sixth chapter to the evolution of human life. The next eight chapters recount human history from the Agricultural Revolution to the end of the twentieth century, the “Modern Era” being the subject of the last four chapters. While preserving a conventional division at 1500, Christian expresses some doubt about that periodization. The first of the Modern chapters begins with the statement, “in the past thousand years, and particularly in the past two or three hundred years, a transformation more rapid and more fundamental than any other in human history has taken place.”[155] For Christian a historical divide around 1000 ce allows him to place the rise of the Mongol empire in the context of the splendors of the Sung Dynasty that attracted Genghis Khan's invaders. As Christian also makes clear in the sentence just quoted and elsewhere, the key changes of the Modern era were slow in coming and only picked up speed from about 1750.