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TheAgesofGlobalizationGeographyTechnologyInstitutionsbyJeffreyD.Sachs.pdf
Praise for The Ages of Globalization
“This dazzling book makes an invaluable contribution to the debate
about the future of globalization by brilliantly summarizing humanity’s
existential challenges and providing bold ideas for ensuring our survival.
Sachs makes a persuasive argument that applying the concept of sustain-
able development must be today’s essential mission. His thoughtful pro-
posals for reforming key international institutions, starting with the UN,
merit particular attention. The Ages of Globalization is required reading for
our times.”
—Vuk Jeremić, former president of the United Nations General Assembly
“In this erudite yet accessible book, Jeffrey D. Sachs traces the history of
modern humans from our migration from Africa some 70,000 years ago to
today. In a pathbreaking account, he shows how geography, technology, and
institutions drive change. His analysis is indispensable for understanding
current global predicaments. A tour de force.”
—Prasannan Parthasarathi, Boston College
“As it comes from Jeffrey D. Sachs, I had expected this book to be analy-
tical, punchy, and readable, and so it is. But it is a pleasure to be able to
report that it is also a book by a superstar economist that takes both history
and geography seriously and that allows the past, with all its complexi-
ties and contingencies, to speak for itself. Impressively broad in both tem-
poral and geographical scope, this is a masterpiece of concision and a great
introduction to global economic history.”
—Kevin O’Rourke, author of A Short History of Brexit: From Brentry to Backstop
“The Ages of Globalization is not just a book for the modern citizen. It is
an essential survival kit for the twenty-first century. At the same time that
humanity was amassing wealth, it was also creating the means of its own
destruction. Now we are facing forces none of us can counter alone, such
as climate change and environmental degradation. Sachs’s call for action
resonates with vigor and urgency. With this book, we can better explore,
learn, and act.”
—Miroslav Lajčák, minister of foreign and European affairs of the Slovak Republic
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“At a time when the foundations of the world economic order are being
challenged, we must rely on the knowledge accumulated throughout his-
tory to make wiser choices for the future of our societies. In The Ages of
Globalization, Sachs offers a superb and unique historical and analytical
framework for understanding the process of globalization, highlighting
its dynamic nature and addressing its social and economic implications.
From the Paleolithic Age to the current digital age, this book examines the
interplay of geography, technology, and institutions to achieve a compre-
hensive explanation of how globalization emerges and evolves. Analysts,
policy makers, social and political leaders, interested citizens, and anyone
concerned with the future of the global economy can draw invaluable les-
sons from this book.”
—Felipe Larraín B., former minister of finance of Chile
“Few scholars have the breadth of knowledge with which to cogently
weave insights from such wide-ranging fields such as agronomy, econom-
ics, archeology, anthropology, and engineering to recount the layered story
of how globalization and development unfolded. As always, Sachs is a treat
to read.”
—Gordon McCord, University of California, San Diego
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The Ages of Globalization
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For Nina
Our family’s newest arrival to the Digital Age, with our hopes and aspirations for peace, prosperity, and
environmental sustainability.
o
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Jeff rey D. Sachs
The Ages of Globalization
Geography, Technology, and Institutions
Columbia University Press / New York
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Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2020 Jeffrey D. Sachs All rights reserved
Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Names: Sachs, Jeffrey, author.
Title: The ages of globalization : geography, technology, and institutions / Jeffrey D. Sachs.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019038327 (print) | LCCN 2019038328 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231193740 (cloth) | ISBN 9780231550482 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Economic history. | World history. | Globalization—History. Classification: LCC HC21.S224 2020 (print) | LCC HC21 (ebook) |
DDC 909–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038327
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038328
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acidfree paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover and title page images The SDG logo (wheel) is the logo for the Sustainable Development Goals
Please note: The content of this publication has not been approved by the United Nations and does not reflect the views of the United Nations
or its officials or Member States. United Nations Sustainable Development Goals web site: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment.
All other symbols are royalty free.
Cover design: Lisa Hamm
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Preface xiii
1 Seven Ages of Globalization 1 The Seven Ages 2
The Acceleration of Change 5 Economic Scale and the Pace of Change 10
Malthusian Pessimism 12 The Gradual Transformation to Urban Life 14
The Interplay of Geography, Technology, and Institutions 16 The Favorable Geographies 20
Geopolitics and Globalization 28 Looking Back to See Forward 30
2 The Paleolithic Age (70,000–10,000 bce) 33 The First Age of Globalization 34
Cultural Acceleration 37 Human Society in the Upper Paleolithic 38 Some Lessons from the Paleolithic Age 40
3 The Neolithic Age (10,000–3000 bce) 41 Diffusion of Agriculture Within Ecological Zones 45
The Early Alluvial Civilizations of Eurasia 46
Contents
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Contents
vi
The Lucky Latitudes 48 Some Lessons from the Neolithic Age 51
4 The Equestrian Age (3000–1000 bce) 53 Animal Domestication 54
Domestication of the Donkey and the Horse 57 The Domestication of the Camel and Camelids 60
The Metal Ages 61 Comparing Old World and New World Developments 62
The Yamnaya Breakthrough in Eurasia 62 The Early Equestrian States 65
Key Development Breakthroughs in the Fertile Crescent 66 Some Lessons from the Equestrian Age 68
5 The Classical Age (1000 bce–1500 ce) 69 The Axial Age 70
Thalassocracy and Tellurocracy 72 The Emergence of the Classical LandBased Empires 73
The Han Empire 80 The Developed World as of 100 CE 82
Global Trade Within the Lucky Latitudes 84 The Fall of Rome and the Rise of Islam 85
The Remarkable Song Dynasty of China 88 The Last Hurrahs of the Steppe Conquerors 91
Some Lessons from the Classical Age 94
6 The Ocean Age (1500–1800) 95 The Great Chinese Reversal 95
The North Atlantic Quest for Ocean Navigation 98
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Contents
vii
The Columbian Exchange 100 The Gunpowder Age and the High Seas 103
The New European Age of Inquiry 104 The Birth of Global Capitalism 107
Europe’s Scramble for Global Empire 108 Insatiable Greed of the Empire Builders 114
The Intertwining of State and Capital 115 Indigenous Populations and African Slaves in
the New World 116 Feeding Europe’s Factories: Cotton 120
Global Empire and Global War 121 Adam Smith’s Summation of the Age of
Global Empire 124 Some Lessons from the Ocean Age 126
7 The Industrial Age (1800–2000) 129 From the Organic Economy to the
EnergyRich Economy 133 Why Did Industrialization Start in Britain? 135 Endogenous Growth and Kondratiev Waves 138 The Diffusion of Industrialization in Europe 141
The Great Global Divergence 143 The Asian Drama: China, India, and Japan 146
Europe Swallows Africa 151 AngloAmerican Hegemony 153
The ThirtyYear European Bloodletting 156 The American Century 159
Decolonization and the Onset of Global Convergence 163
Some Lessons from the Industrial Age 167
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Contents
viii
8 The Digital Age (Twenty-First Century) 169 The Digital Revolution 170
Convergent Growth and China’s Surge to the Forefront 178 The Challenges of Sustainable Development 183
The Challenge of Inequality 185 The Challenge of Planetary Boundaries 187
The Risks of Conflict 192 Some Lessons from the Digital Age 193
9 Guiding Globalization in the Twenty-First Century 195 Sustainable Development 196 SocialDemocratic Ethos 201
Subsidiarity and the Public Sphere 203 Reforming the United Nations 207
Ethics in Action for a Common Plan 211
Acknowledgments 215
Data Appendix 217
Notes 225
Further Readings 233
Bibliography 239
Index 249
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The COVID19 epidemic hit as this book was going to press. A most global phenomenon—a pandemic disease—was suddenly provoking the most local of responses: quarantines, lockdowns of neighbor hoods, and the closure of borders and trade. In just three months, the virus spread from Wuhan, China, to more than 140 other countries. In the four teenth century, the bubonic plague spread the Black Death from China to Italy in the course of some sixteen years, 1331 to 1347. In our time, the patho gen arrived within days by nonstop flight from Wuhan to Rome.
This book is about complexities of globalization, including the power ful capacity of globalization to improve the human condition while bring ing undoubted threats as well. The interconnections of humanity across the globe enable the sharing of ideas, the enjoyment of diverse cultures, and the exchanges of diverse and distinctive goods across vast geographies. I savor my morning coffee, which arrives not from the coffee shop across the street but from the sloping tropical hillsides of Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Colom bia, thousands of miles away. I delight in having visited these places as well, and have enjoyed their rich cultures and great natural beauty. I have learned from such visits and my work that human kindness, our aspirations for our children, and our enjoyments of life are common to all humanity, no matter how diverse our backgrounds and our material conditions.
Preface
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Preface
x
The new coronavirus reminds us yet again that the benefits of global trade and travel have always been accompanied by the global spread of dis- ease and other ills. In this book, I will discuss how Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, viewed the voyages of discovery of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama. He wrote that the discoveries of the sea routes from Europe to the Americas and to Asia were the most important events of human history, because they linked all parts of the world in a web of transport and commerce, with vast potential benefits. Smith also wrote, with dismay, that the new sea routes occasioned a massive repression of native societies by European conquerors and colonizers.
Because Smith lived a century before Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur, Giovanni Grassi, Ronald Ross, Martinus Beijerinck, and others who elab- orated the bacterial and viral transmission of disease, he did not realize the key role that Old World pathogens played in devastating the Native American societies. Columbus brought to the Americas not only conquer- ors but also a massive biological exchange. The Europeans brought horses, cattle, and other plants and animals to the Americas for farming, and also many new infectious diseases, including smallpox, measles, and malaria, while bringing back to Europe the cultivation of the potato, maize, toma- toes, and other crops and farm animals. This “Columbian Exchange” united the world in trade while dividing the world in new kinds of inequalities of wealth and power.
The excess mortality of Native Americans caused by Old World diseases was devastating. The native populations were “naïve” to the Old World pathogens, and hence unprotected immunologically. In the same way, the world population today is immunologically naïve, and hence vulnerable, to the new coronavirus sweeping the planet. It is highly likely, thank good- ness, that the illnesses and deaths caused by COVID-19 will be far less severe than the epidemics that ravaged Native American societies in the sixteenth century. Nonetheless, the current pandemic will influence global politics and society as other diseases have in the past.
In fact, we don’t have to go back to the fourteenth-century Black Death or the sixteenth-century Columbian Exchange to recognize the profound role of diseases in shaping societies and economies. Until late in the nine- teenth century, Africa’s heavy burden of malaria created a kind of protec- tive barrier against European imperial conquest. West Africa was known as the “white man’s grave,” since European soldiers succumbed in such high
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Preface
xi
proportions to malaria. This barrier fell when the British learned to extract an antimalarial treatment, quinine, from the bark of the Andean cinchona tree. Gin and tonic (containing quinine) thereby became the beverage of British imperial conquest. Since then, Africa’s malaria burden has stood as an obstacle to child survival and economic development, though new drugs and preventative measures are enabling humanity to fight back against this ageold scourge.
More recently, another killer pathogen circled the globe and caused dev astation and havoc: the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, the cause of AIDS. HIV, like COVID19, is a zoonosis, that is, a pathogen of animal populations that jumps to human populations through some kind of inter action and perhaps genetic mutation. AIDS entered the human popula tion most likely from West African apes that were killed for bushmeat. COVID19 entered the human population most likely from bats. In the case of AIDS, the virus apparently spread among Africans for decades in the middle of the twentieth century, then was transmitted internationally in the 1970s and early 1980s. HIV/AIDS was diagnosed for the first time in San Francisco in the early 1980s, decades after its first introduction into the human population. By that time, many millions of Africans were already infected by, and dying from, the HIV virus.
AIDS marked another major event of globalization, at both its most devastating and its most inspiring. The deaths from AIDS quickly mounted into the tens of millions, with vast attendant suffering. Many of those with HIV infection were from socially marginalized groups: the very poor, eth nic minorities, the LGBT community, intravenous drug users, and others. This delayed the response of many governments, but civil society groups, led first and foremost by people infected with HIV, demanded action and step by step moved the world’s governments, although after costly delays.
Impressively, the scientific community sprang quickly into action, mak ing rapid and fundamental discoveries about the nature of the virus, the causes of disease, and the ways to fight both. Within roughly a decade of the identification of HIV as a new zoonotic disease, scientists discovered a number of antiviral medicines that could turn the HIV infection from a nearly certain deadly ailment to a chronic and controlled infection. In these breakthroughs and the subsequent distribution of the new medicines, glo balization played a huge role. The science of discovery was global, with new scientific knowledge moving rapidly across all continents.
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Preface
xii
The distribution of the new medicines was also a coordinated global effort. A notable initiative was the launch of a new Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, in which I was thrilled and honored to play a role during its early formulation and development. The speed of policy imple mentation and health interventions was greatly spurred by rising public awareness and the crucial activist leadership of civil society.
COVID19 similarly provokes the reckoning of the balance sheet of glo balization, and the policy challenge of promoting the positive sides while limiting the negative consequences. The early steps in fighting COVID 19 have involved closing down international trade and travel, and even restricting the movements of people between and within cities of single nations. Quarantines are back, the word itself referring to the forty days (quaranta giorni in Italian) that Venetians held ships away from the port when the ships were suspected of carrying plague. The policy of quaran tine dates back to the late fourteenth century. As did the AIDS crisis, the COVID19 pandemic will require great attention and sensitivity to social justice in implementing measures to confront the disease.
Some concerns are being raised once again in our own time: that open trade is simply too dangerous, that we should revert to closed borders and national autarky (selfsufficiency). This is an illusion. While quarantines may indeed limit the spread of disease, they rarely stop the spread of the pathogens entirely. And their successes surely come at very high cost. Clo sures of trade bring their own kinds of miseries, starting with the massive losses of economic output and livelihoods. 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 inter national cooperation to control the negative consequences of globalscale interconnectedness.
This has entailed the invention of new forms of global cooperation, one of the most important themes of this book. From the late eighteenth cen tury onward, philosophers, statesmen, politicians, and activists have sought new ways to govern globalization in order to promote its benefits while controlling its many potential harms. The fight against pandemic disease has loomed large in the efforts at cooperation. Indeed, the International Sanitary Conferences that began in 1851 and continued until 1938 were among the first modern efforts at intensive global scientific and policy
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Preface
xiii
cooperation. These efforts at disease control gave rise to the World Health Organization in 1948, one of the first major agencies of the new United Nations, which was founded at the end of World War II in 1945. WHO, of course, is currently at the center of the global fight against COVID19. WHO has helped to coordinate scientific information about the pathogen and how to control it, and to coordinate and monitor the global push to contain and end the pandemic.
Globalization enables one part of the world to learn from others. When one country shows successes in containing the spread of COVID19, other parts of the world quickly aim to learn of the new methods and whether they can be applied in a local context. The development of new drugs and vaccines to fight COVID19 is also a global effort, as was the case with HIV. The clinical trials to test the new candidate drugs and vaccines will involve researchers spanning the world. The distribution and uses of the new drugs and vaccines will also require cooperation on a global scale.
Disease control is not the only area where global cooperation is vital today. The case for global cooperation and institutions extends to many urgent concerns, including the control of humaninduced climate change; the conservation of biodiversity; the control and reversal of the massive pollution of the air, soils, and oceans; the proper uses and governance of the internet; the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons; the avoidance of mass forced migrations; and the everpresent challenge of avoiding or ending violent conflicts. All of these challenges must be confronted in a world that is too often divided, distrustful, and distracted, and now, preoccupied with a new zoonosis that has suddenly become a new pandemic.
This book will not provide simple answers or antidotes to these ills and threats. The history of globalization is a history of humanity’s glorious achievements, cruelties, and selfinflicted harms, and of the great complex ities of achieving progress in the midst of crisis. Globalization, we shall see, involves the intricate interplay of physical geography, human institutions, and technical knowhow. COVID19 is at once a physical phenomenon, a sudden intruder into our politics and social life, and a target of scientific discovery. It is, therefore, the kind of phenomenon of globalization that has been part of human experience from the very start of our species. I hope this book will shed light on that long experience of global interconnected ness, and on the role of globalization in shaping our humanity and lives.
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Humanity has always been globalized, since the dispersals of modern humans from Africa some seventy thousand years ago. Yet global-ization has changed its character from age to age. Those changes have often come quickly and violently. In the twenty-first century, we need
to change peacefully and wisely; in the nuclear age, there may be no second
chances in the event of global war. By studying the history of globalization,
we can arrive at an informed understanding of globalization in the twenty-
first century and how to manage it successfully.
In my interpretation, we have passed through seven distinct ages of glo-
balization from the deep past to the present day. In each of these seven
ages, global change emerged from the interplay of physical geography,
technology, and institutions. Physical geography in this context means
the climate, flora and fauna, diseases, topography, soils, energy resources,
mineral deposits, and Earth processes that affect the conditions of life.
Technology refers to both the hardware and software of our production
systems. Institutions include politics, laws, and cultural ideas and practices
that guide society. Geography, technology, and institutions are subject to
remarkable variability and change, and they interact powerfully to shape
societies across place and time.
Understanding the interplay of geography, technology, and institutions
is fundamental to understanding human history. This understanding is also
1 Seven Ages of Globalization
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2
fundamental to navigating the changes under way in the twenty-first cen-
tury. By examining the history of globalization, we can make wiser choices
for our societies and economies in our own time.
Philosophers, historians, theologians, and others have long asked: Is
there a direction to history? Can we speak of long-term change or only of
repeating cycles of history? Is there long-term progress? I will suggest that,
yes, there is an arrow of history. In each age, human beings have become
more aware of the wider world. Technological advances—especially in
transport and communications—and demographic changes in the size and
structure of human populations have intensified our global-scale interde-
pendencies and awareness. As a result, politics too has gone from being
very local to being global, never more so than in our own time.
Let us keep our eye on five big questions. First, what have been the main
drivers of global-scale change? Second, how do geography, technology, and
institutions interact? Third, how do changes in one region diffuse to others?
Fourth, how have these changes affected global interdependence? Fifth, what
lessons can we glean from each age to help us meet our challenges today?
The Seven Ages
Globalization signifies the interlinkages of diverse societies across large
geographical areas. These interlinkages are technological, economic, insti-
tutional, cultural, and geopolitical. They include interactions of societ-
ies across the world through trade, finance, enterprise, migration, culture,
empire, and war.
To trace the history of globalization, I will describe seven distinct ages:
the Paleolithic Age, our prehistory when humans were still foragers; the
Neolithic Age, when farming first began; the Equestrian Age, when the
domestication of the horse and the development of proto-writing enabled
long-distance trade and communications; the Classical Age, when large
empires first emerged; the Ocean Age, when empires first expanded across
the oceans and beyond the accustomed ecological zones of the homeland;
the Industrial Age, when a few societies, led by Great Britain, ushered
in the industrial economy; and the Digital Age, our own time, in which
nearly the entire world is instantaneously interconnected by digital data.
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3
In the Paleolithic Age, which I date from 70,000 BCE to 10,000 BCE,
long-distance interactions were by migration, as small groups migrated
from one place to another. As these groups moved, they carried with
them their tools, their know-how, and their emerging cultures. As migrat-
ing groups of Homo sapiens (anatomically modern humans) entered new
regions, they had to fend for themselves in new ways, confronting other
hominins (members of the genus Homo) such as Neanderthals and Den-
isovans, new predators and pathogens, new ecological conditions (such as
living at high elevations), and of course, other competing groups of modern
humans. That competition contributed to cultural patterns that have con-
tinued to the present day.1
The end of the last ice age and the onset of a warmer climate enabled
the next phase of globalization, the Neolithic (“new stone”) Age, which I
date from 10,000 BCE to 3000 BCE. The fundamental breakthrough was
agriculture, both crop cultivation and animal husbandry. As foraging gave
way to farming, nomadism gave way to sedentary life in villages. The range
of human interaction widened from the clan to the village and to poli-
tics and trade between villages. Trade in precious items—gemstones, shells,
minerals, tools—was pursued at distances of hundreds of kilometers.
The domestication of the horse ushered in a third age of globalization,
the Equestrian Age, which I date from 3000 BCE to 1000 BCE. This period
is typically labeled the Copper and Bronze ages, though I prefer to empha-
size the role of the horse over that of the minerals. With the domesticated
horse, rapid, long-distance overland transport and communications became
possible. The horse served several basic roles: animal traction (horsepower),
communications (conveying messages), and military (cavalry). In modern
jargon, we would say that the domesticated horse was a “disruptive tech-
nology,” somewhat like the invention of the steam engine, locomotive,
automobile, and tank combined. In politics, the horse hastened the arrival
of the state, by enabling the reach across much greater distances of public
administration and coercive force.
The next age, known to us as the Classical Age, which I date from 1000
BCE to 1500 CE, marked the rise and intense competition of large land-
based empires. Starting around 1000 BCE, some states—such as the neo-
Assyrian state in Mesopotamia and, soon after, the Achaemenid state
of Persia—embarked on vast territorial expansions, which succeeded
as the result of advantages in governance, both military and political.
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4
Ideas mattered enormously in the rise of the empires. The major empires
were spurred by new religious and philosophical outlooks, such as the new
philosophies of the Greco-Roman world, that profoundly shaped the out-
looks of these societies. The imperial age ushered in trans-Eurasian trade,
such as between the Roman Empire in the west and the Han Empire of
China in the east, carried out both overland and by sea routes along the
coastlines of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean.
By around 1400 CE, advances in oceangoing navigation and military
technologies led the transition to a new era, the Ocean Age, which I date
from 1500 to 1800. During this new age, empires became transoceanic,
indeed global, for the first time, with temperate-zone imperial powers of
Europe conquering and colonizing tropical regions in Africa, the Ameri-
cas, and Asia. Revolutionary changes in global trade ensued, such as the
rise of multinational corporations, the vast expansion of transoceanic trade,
and the mass movement of millions of people across the oceans, including
the forcible enslavement of millions of Africans bound for American mines
and plantations. Politics also became global in scale for the first time, lead-
ing to the first global wars fought simultaneously across several continents.
The Industrial Age, which I date from 1800 to 2000, marked another
profound acceleration of global change. Changes that used to take place
over the course of centuries or even millennia now occurred over just a
few decades. The Industrial Age was marked by remarkable waves of tech-
nological advance, and a powerful new alliance of science and technology.
With the tapping of fossil fuels, made possible by the invention of the
steam engine and the internal combustion engine, industrial production
soared. Global populations soared too, as the result of massive increases in
food production. While the Ocean Age gave rise to transoceanic empires,
the Industrial Age gave rise to the first global hegemon, Great Britain, and
later, the United States. These two powers bestrode the entire globe with
unprecedented military, technological, and financial power. But, as the end
of the British Empire demonstrated, even hegemons can quickly lose their
place at the apex of the global competition.
We have now entered the Digital Age, from 2000 to the present, the
result of the astounding capacities of digital technologies: computers,
Internet, mobile telephony, and artificial intelligence, to name a few. The
global transmission of data is pervasive: computational power has mul-
tiplied billions-fold, and information technologies are disrupting every
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5
aspect of the world economy, society, and geopolitics. We are moving from
an era of hegemonic power to a multipolar world, in which several regional
powers coexist. The ubiquitous flows of information have globalized eco-
nomics and politics more directly and urgently than in the Industrial Age.
We have seen how a hiccup in one part of the world economy, for example,
the failure of the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers on Sep-
tember 14, 2008, can within days create a global-scale financial panic and
economic crash.
Table 1.1 summarizes the seven ages, with their time intervals, major
technological changes, and scale of governance.
The Acceleration of Change
At the dawn of human history, all humans were foragers, engaged in hunt-
ing and gathering food for their survival. There was no urban-rural divide,
as there were no villages, much less cities. The Neolithic revolution in
agriculture gave rise to farm villages and sedentary life, mostly (but not
completely) displacing foraging and nomadism. For thousands of years,
up to the start of industrialization itself, almost all of humanity lived in
rural areas, and most engaged in subsistence agriculture. Each farm family
struggled to feed itself, with only a tiny margin of surplus, if any, sold in the
marketplace or used to pay taxes.
Up until the twentieth century in much of the world, and until today in
the poorest countries, agricultural production was so meager that the risk of
famine and mass hunger was ever present. The French Revolution in 1789 was
partly provoked by widespread hunger during attempts by the government to
raise taxes to cover public debts. The Irish famine of the 1840s claimed around
1 million deaths. In the second half of the nineteenth century, repeated fam-
ines in British India and other colonized regions killed tens of millions.2
Industrialization and the accompanying advances in farm mechaniza-
tion 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 of
the workforce to feed the rest. The expanded food output led to sharply
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7
lower risks of generalized famines and widespread hunger. The “surplus”
agricultural workers, replaced by farm machines, left for the cities to find
employment. Britain, the world’s first industrial society, became more than
half urban around 1880, at a time when most of the world was still over-
whelmingly rural. As industrialization spread, albeit very unevenly around
the world, urbanization and living standards began to rise.
The remarkable fact is how long it took for humanity to break free of
omnipresent and nearly all-encompassing poverty and hunger. Looked at
in the long sweep of the human experience, most economic and demo-
graphic change has occurred in the blink of an eye, during the past two
hundred or so years of our roughly three hundred thousand years as a spe-
cies. The first lesson of long-term global change, then, is that it has been
super-exponential, meaning that it has come at a rising rate, with the larg-
est changes occurring in the very recent past.
Let us consider three dimensions of long-term change. The first is the
total human population. The second is the rate of urbanization—that is,
the share of the global population residing in urban areas. The third is the
global output per person. The Hyde 3.1 Project has heroically worked to
construct consistent estimates of population and urbanization globally and
by region during the period since 10,000 BCE.3 It is a remarkable accom-
plishment and a vital body of evidence. The estimates of output per person
come from a similarly remarkable effort, that of Angus Maddison, a late
and great economic historian.
The estimated total world population over the past twelve thousand
years is shown in figure 1.1. Between 10,000 and 3000 BCE, during the Neo-
lithic Age, the estimated population rose from 2 million to 45 million, an
annualized growth rate of just 0.04 percent. Between 3000 and 1000 BCE,
the Equestrian Age, the growth rate rose slightly to 0.05 percent. From
1000 BCE to 1500 CE, the Classical Age, the growth rate rose again to 0.06
percent. During 1500 to 1800, the Ocean Age, the annualized growth rate
rose further to 0.25 percent, and the global population doubled from an
estimated 461 million to 990 million. Then, during 1800 to 2000, the Indus-
trial Age, the growth rate jumped to 0.92 percent, resulting in a more than
sixfold increase in world population—from 990 million to 6.145 billion.
Thus, for most of human history, the rise of population year to year, even
century to century, was imperceptible. With the Ocean and Industrial Ages,
the global population soared.
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8
The estimated urbanization rate is shown in figure 1.2. The graph looks
nearly the same. At the start of the Neolithic period, almost all humans
were still foragers. Urbanization was zero. Yet even ten thousand years later,
in 1 CE, while most of humanity lived in small agricultural settlements,
the proportion living in cities was still only 1 percent. A thousand years
later, in 1000 CE, urbanization had reached around 3 percent. By 1500, the
urbanization rate stood at a mere 3.6 percent. As late as 1900, the global
urbanization rate was only 16 percent. It is only in the twenty-first cen-
tury that more than half of humanity lives in urban settings (an estimated
55 percent as of 2020). Though we marvel at the magnificent urban remains
of ancient Rome and delight in the dazzling urban achievements of Renais-
sance Florence and Venice, the world’s cities in total were home to only a
very small share of humanity until very recently.
Maddison’s estimates of global output per person from 1 CE to 2008 are
shown in figure 1.3. Again, we see the same pattern as with population and
urbanization: no perceptible change in global output per person before
1500, with annual growth at 0.01 percent; a tiny rise in output between 1500
and 1820, with annual growth at 0.05 percent; and then, with the onset of
industrialization, a decisive turn upward, with annual growth between 1820
7,000
YearBCE CE
Po p
u la
ti o
n (i
n m
ill io
n s)
6,000
5,000
4,000
3,000
2,000
1,000
–10,000 –8000 –6000 –4000 –2000 20000 0
World Population, 10,000 BCE to 2000 CE
Source: Kees Klein Goldewijk, Arthur Beusen, and Peter Janssen. “Long-Term Dynamic
Modeling of Global Population and Built-up Area in a Spatially Explicit Way:
Hyde 3.1.” The Holocene 20, no. 4 (2010): 565–73.
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9
and 2000 at 1.3 percent. During the 180 years from 1820 to 2000, world out-
put per person increased roughly eleven times, leading to an equally dra-
matic fall in the global rate of extreme poverty—from around 90 percent in
1820 to roughly 10 percent as of 2015.4
0
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18
World Rate of Urbanization, 10,000 BCE to Present
Source: Kees Klein Goldewijk, Arthur Beusen, and Peter Janssen. “Long-Term Dynamic
Modeling of Global Population and Built-up Area in a Spatially Explicit Way:
Hyde 3.1.” The Holocene 20, no. 4 (2010): 565–73.
8,400
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a
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3,400
2,400
1,400
400 0 200 400 600 800 1000
Year 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000
World Output per Person, 1–2008 CE. Output in 1990 International
Geary-Khamis dollars.
Source: Angus Maddison. “Statistics on World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP,
1–2008 AD.” Historical Statistics 3 (2010): 1–36.
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10
These three cases of super-exponential growth are dramatic. They
remind us of the dramatic changes in the world since the onset of industri-
alization. Yet we should not infer that societies were static before 1800. The
long period until the start of industrialization was an active and necessary
runway for the eventual liftoff of the world economy. The preceding ages
of globalization set the essential foundations of science, technology, gover-
nance, commercial law, and sheer ambition that ultimately gave rise to the
Industrial Age.
Economic Scale and the Pace of Change
There is a basic idea in economics that a larger market leads to higher
incomes and more rapid growth. With a larger market, there can be more
specialization in job tasks, leading to greater skills and proficiency of the
workforce in each line of economic activity (farming, construction, manu-
facturing, transport, healthcare, and so forth), and falling costs of produc-
tion. With a larger market, there are also greater incentives to invent new
products—because they reach more consumers—and more inventors are
available to produce breakthroughs.
The most fundamental reason for the takeoff of economic growth
around 1800 is therefore scale. World population had reached nearly 1
billion people by 1800, and humanity was increasingly interconnected
through trade, transport, migration, and politics. Of course, some parts of
the world, notably the North Atlantic, were the biggest beneficiaries of
this new scale, and some places, notably sub-Saharan Africa and India,
succumbed to brutal and debilitating imperial conquest. Yet the scale of
global enterprise by 1800 was incomparably larger than, say, in 10,000 BCE,
when an estimated 2 million widely-dispersed human beings constituted
the entirety of humanity.
One can therefore see the history of globalization as a series of scale-
enlarging transformations. In the Paleolithic Age, modern humans enlarged
the scale of human settlement through migration across the world, yet most
individuals spent their lives within a band of some thirty to fifty people.5
In the Neolithic Age, the global population rose roughly twenty-two times,
from around 2 million in 10,000 BCE to around 45 million in 3000 BCE, and
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11
individuals lived in villages of several hundred persons. In the Equestrian
Age, the population rose from around 45 million in 3000 BCE to 115 million
in 1000 BCE, with the vast majority in an increasingly interconnected east-
west band of Eurasia. Now, for the first time, humanity was organized into
recognizable states, no longer merely interspersed villages. In the Classical
Age, the human population soared to 188 million by 1 CE, 295 million by
1000, and 390 million by 1400. Human beings increasingly lived in large
multiethnic, multireligious empires covering vast land areas including the
Roman, Han, Mauryan, Persian, Byzantine, Umayyad, Mongol, and other
empires. These empires not only fought with each other, but also traded
with each other over vast distances.
With the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, and
the transition to the Ocean Age, scale increased yet again, this time to a
global reach that reconnected the Old World and the New World through
ocean navigation. The world population soared again as food varieties were
exchanged across the oceans, such as wheat from the Old World to the
Americas and maize from the Americas to the Old World, permitting a
vast increase in food production and populations. By 1800, the popula-
tion stood at 990 million. The Industrial Age decisively intensified global
interconnections—by rail, ocean steamer, automobile, aviation, telegraph,
telephone, satellite, and eventually the Internet and the global population
soared. For the first time in human history, there were truly hegemonic
political powers with sway over much of the globe: first the British Empire
and then, after World War II, the United States. With the transition to
the Digital Age, global power is shifting again, and the intensity of global
interactions continues to rise, this time with pervasive, real-time flows of
data across the planet.
In this sense, the ages of globalization both explain and are explained by
the rising scale of global interactions. Each boost in global scale has given
rise to new technologies that have expanded populations and production.
Each boost of scale, in turn, has changed the nature of governance and
geopolitics. We are now reckoning, however, with a phenomenon unique
to our time. In 2020, with the population now at 7.7 billion and rising by
75–80 million each year, and with output now at around $17,000 per person
on average (measured at purchasing-power-adjusted prices), the sheer scale
of human activity is dangerously impinging on fundamental environmental
processes: climate, water, air, soils, and biodiversity. We have reached a scale
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12
at which human activities taken as a whole are dangerously changing the
climate, biodiversity, and other Earth systems such as the water and nitro-
gen cycles. We take up that theme later in the book.
While scale is crucial for productivity and innovation, geography is
often decisive in determining scale. The scale of an economy, or a group
of interconnected economies, depends on the ability to trade, and there-
fore on the geographic conditions for the movement of goods, people,
and ideas. Places that are remote or isolated will not benefit as much from
trade and the diffusion of ideas and technologies as places that are more
accessible. The Americas, for example, lagged far behind the Old World in
technological advances until the two hemispheres, separated for ten thou-
sand years, were reconnected by ocean-based transport after 1500. Remote
mountainous societies and small island societies far from the mainland and
from shipping lanes typically lag technologically behind more coastal and
therefore accessible regions. Eurasia long had vast geographical advantages
over the Americas, Africa, and Oceania in achieving scale—through more
connected trade, easier communications, and shared ecological niches that
facilitated the diffusion of technologies, institutions, and cultural practices.
Malthusian Pessimism
The basic history described so far seems to be one of unfolding progress,
albeit progress repeatedly marked by injustice, inequalities, and extraordi-
nary violence. Yet there have long been powerful voices of caution regard-
ing the sustainability of progress. The most influential pessimist in modern
economic thinking has no doubt been Thomas Robert Malthus, an Eng-
lish pastor writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Malthus famously warned against trying to improve the lot of the poor,
and even against the chances for long-term economic progress. He argued
that following any rise in productivity, the world would simply end up with
more poor people, but with no long-term solution to poverty. Malthus’s
provocative pessimism became known as the Malthusian curse. He raised
the fundamental question as to whether long-term gains in living stan-
dards can be sustained.
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13
Here is Malthus’s reasoning. Suppose that farmers learned to double
their output. It would seem that everybody could eat twice as much, and
that hunger and poverty would plummet. But what if the population were
to increase as a result, as more children survived to adulthood and more
young people could afford to start families? If the population doubled
while the farmland remained unchanged, the amount of food per person
would be back where it started. And if the population were to more than
double—that is, if the population were to overshoot—then living standards
could actually fall below the starting point, until new bouts of hunger and
disease reversed the overshooting.
Malthus made a provocative and important point, but fortunately for us,
his conclusions were far too pessimistic. When living standards began to
rise globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and as more people
moved to cities, families chose to have fewer children and to invest more
in the education, nutrition, and health care of each child. They shifted, in
the jargon of demography, from “quantity” to “quality” of child-rearing. As
living standards, literacy, and urbanization have risen worldwide, fertility
rates have declined in most parts of the world to “replacement rate,” two
children per mother, or below.6 As a result, productivity improvements are
not being offset by rising populations. There are still a few regions with
very high fertility rates—notably in sub-Saharan Africa—and as a result,
living standards are not yet rising at the rates needed to end poverty in
those places. The expectation is that with more urbanization and longer
years of schooling, especially for girls, fertility rates will decline in those
places as well.
Yet Malthus’s pessimism is still all too relevant for us today; we have
not yet fully disproved his warnings. With nearly 8 billion people on the
planet, and with population projected to rise to around 9.7 billion by 2050,
and the massive environmental dangers ahead—climate change, loss of
biodiversity, mega-pollution—we have not yet shown that we can sustain
the progress to date. To do so will require not only stabilizing the global
population but also ending the massive environmental harms we are now
causing. We must still make the transitions to renewable energy, sustain-
able agriculture, and a circular economy that safely recycles its wastes.
Until those transitions are accomplished, Malthus’s specter will continue
to loom large.
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14
The Gradual Transformation to Urban Life
Across the ages of globalization, we have seen not only an increase in
scale—of the human population, of economic production, and of politics—
but also a decisive shift from rural to urban life. It is only in recent decades
that a significant proportion of humanity has resided in cities and engaged
in nonagricultural activities. To understand this change, we should examine
in more detail the structure of an economy.
Economic activities are usefully categorized into three productive sec-
tors, called the primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors. The primary sec-
tor includes the production of food and feed crops, animal products, other
agriculture (such as cotton, timber, fish, and vegetable oils), and mining
products (such as coal, oil, copper, tin, and precious metals). The second-
ary sector, or industrial sector, involves the transformation of primary com-
modities into final products (such as buildings, machinery, processed foods,
and electric power). The tertiary sector involves services that support pro-
ductive activities (freight transport, warehousing, and finance), individual
wellbeing (education, health, leisure), and governance (military, public
administration, and courts).
The primary sector requires large inputs of land and marine resources
per worker and therefore takes place mainly in rural areas, where popula-
tion densities are relatively low. Tertiary, or service production, on the other
hand, requires extensive face-to-face interactions and therefore takes places
mainly in urban areas, where population densities are high. Industrial pro-
duction can be located both in rural areas (in the case, say, of a smelting
operation close to a mine) and in urban areas (in the case, say, of a con-
struction site or a garment factory close to customers).
The production of goods (in the primary and secondary sectors) and
of services (in the tertiary sector) uses both human effort and machines.
The human effort can be mainly physical, as in weeding a field by hand or
clearing a forest, or cognitive—for example, a medical doctor diagnosing a
disease or a judge deciding a case. Generally, physical labor requires good
health, youthful vigor, and adequate nourishment, while cognitive labor
also requires formal schooling, training, mentorship, and experience.
Over time, humanity has built more and more powerful machines to
substitute for human brawn. In ancient societies, almost all production was
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15
achieved through human physical labor aided by a small range of tools such
as flints, awls, bows and arrows, containers, and hammers. Transport was
accomplished by carrying goods from one place to another. Communica-
tion was by word of mouth. Today, machines have replaced physical labor
in most arduous activities, and work is increasingly cognitive, based on
human thought. Smart machines will substitute for that kind of work, as
well, in the coming decades.
Economists have identified a basic recurring pattern of change among
the three sectors. In the Paleolithic Age, before the advent of agriculture,
all humans were part of the primary sector. Productive activity involved
hunting and gathering. The industrial sector occupied a tiny proportion of
activities: making tools and weapons, building shelters, sewing clothing,
preparing food. Services were performed within the household or shared
within clans. In the Neolithic Age, with the advent of agriculture, around
90 percent of humans remained engaged in the primary sector, with up
to 10 percent engaged in industry (construction, metallurgy) and services
(religion, public administration). Indeed, for most of human history, the
primary sector occupied 80 percent or more of human activity, with the rest
divided between industry and services.
With the advent of scientific farming beginning in the eighteenth cen-
tury (including early mechanization and scientific knowledge about soil
nutrients), the proportion of employment in the primary sector began to
decline. The reason is simple. Society must devote enough labor effort to
feed the population. When agriculture is rudimentary, each household
feeds itself with almost no surplus for nonfarm households. Almost every
household must therefore engage in agriculture to provide the food needed
for survival. When agriculture is modernized and yields per farmer rise,
one household can feed itself and many others. In the United States today,
one farmer can feed around seventy families, so that employment in agri-
culture accounts for just 1.4 percent of the workforce.
The global result is the time pattern illustrated in figure 1.4, which uses
very approximate numbers to illustrate the key points. In the Paleolithic Age,
all work—hunting and gathering—was in the primary sector. Today, pri-
mary employment (agricultural and mining) is around 28 percent of world-
wide employment, and secondary employment is now around 22 percent,
while tertiary (service) employment is now around 50 percent of total
employment. In the future, both the primary and secondary sector shares
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16
will continue to decline as jobs continue to shift toward services. In the
United States, the shift from primary to tertiary employment is much fur-
ther along. U.S. primary-sector employment is now a mere 2 percent of
the total, with industry (construction and manufacturing) accounting for
only 13 percent and services accounting for 85 percent of all jobs!7 In the
course of the twenty-first century, global employment will continue to shift
relentlessly to the service economy as machines increasingly take over the
tasks of agriculture, mining, construction, and manufacturing.
The Interplay of Geography, Technology, and Institutions
The economic system of any time and place rests on three foundations:
geography, technology, and institutions. The three are, of course, mutually
dependent. Consider the coal-burning steam engine, the most important
invention of the Industrial Age. The steam engine offered a brilliant new
way to create motive force in factories and transport, leading to industrial-
ization and eventually to a vast increase in productivity and living standards
(while displacing and even impoverishing many people in the short term).
0
20
40
60
80
100 Sh
ar e
o f e
m p
lo ym
en t
Paleolithic Neolithic Equestrian Classical Ocean Industrial Digital
Primary Secondary Tertiary
Estimate of Employment Shares by Major Sector
in the Seven Ages of Globalization
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17
The invention of the steam engine in eighteenth-century Britain
depended on geography—specifically, the presence of coal in England that
could be mined and transported at low cost. Its invention and deployment
also depended on Britain’s economic institutions. The inventor of the mod-
ern steam engine, James Watt, was out to make a profit, and he expected to
do so in part because Britain offered legal protection for intellectual ideas
and a market to sell the product. Watt patented his invention and success-
fully defended his patents from those who tried to cash in on his inven-
tion. Moreover, industrialists purchased and deployed Watt’s steam engines
because they could readily establish their own companies under British law.
Economists have long debated whether economic wellbeing and prog-
ress are the results of geography, technology, or institutions. Some have
argued vociferously that institutions are the key: without patents, there
would have been no steam engine. Some have argued that technologies
are the key: without Watt’s ingenuity and skill as a craftsman, there would
have been no patent and no industrial revolution. Others have that geogra-
phy is decisive: without the physical accessibility of coal, Watt’s ingenuity
would have been theoretical at best.
Clearly this debate is misguided. The industrial revolution emerged as
a result of the interaction of geography, technology, and institutions. That
complex interaction, indeed, is why the industrial revolution was such an
extraordinary event. Many factors had to combine to produce the break-
through of the commercially successful steam engine. To understand the
dynamics of change, we need to think interactively among the three pillars
of geography, technology, and institutions, as illustrated in figure 1.5. These
three domains are interdependent; we cannot understand economic history
and economic change without taking all three into account.
Let us look at some of the detailed dimensions of geography, technol-
ogy, and institutions. Geography involves at least six major factors. The
first is climate, meaning the year-round typical patterns of temperature
and rainfall that shape the kinds of crops that can be produced, the kinds
of farm animals that can be raised, and the suitability for human work and
habitation. The second is biodiversity, including the presence or absence
of particular species of plants and animals. The third is patterns of dis-
ease incidence, transmission, and prevalence, which are shaped by climate,
biodiversity, human population densities, and the accidents of evolution
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Seven Ages of Globalization
18
and history. The fourth is physical topography and proximity to coasts,
rivers, and mountain passes. The fifth is primary energy resource avail-
ability. The sixth is deposits of copper, iron, tin, gold, and other minerals.
These geographical factors must be considered in light of existing tech-
nologies. An economy depends both on its physical resource base and on
the know-how to use those natural resources. Since each age of globaliza-
tion has been characterized by advances in know-how, the implications of
geography have changed along with the advances of knowledge. The great
grasslands of the steppe region meant a lot more after the domestication
of the horse than before. The presence of coal and oil reserves meant a lot
more after the invention of the steam engine and the internal combus-
tion engine, respectively. The intense sunshine of the deserts will mean a lot
more in the future with the deployment of low-cost photovoltaic energy.
Such examples run deep throughout the human experience. The control
of fire enabled early humans to move to colder biomes; the multisite inven-
tion of agriculture enabled dense human settlements in alluvial plains; the
domesticated horse expanded the zones of agriculture; Columbus’s voyages
of discovery ultimately led to massive European migrations to the Ameri-
cas; the Suez and Panama canals deeply altered the costs and patterns of
Geographical Conditions
Climate Biodiversity Disease burden Physical topography Primary energy resources Mineral deposits
Culture
religion, language, gender relations
Law
public law, private law judicial system
Economic Organizations
partnerships, corporations, not-for-profits
Politics
constitutions state structures
Agriculture Mining Industry Information Education Science Military Public Administration
Technology and Know-how
Institutions
Geography, Technology & Institutions
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19
global trade and, with global warming, new trade routes in the Arctic Sea
may do the same; the British mass production of quinine to control malaria
enabled the European conquest of tropical Africa; the railroad opened up
the interiors of continents for food production and trade. The economic
importance of geography is therefore constantly reshaped by changing
knowledge and technologies.
We should keep in mind that the Earth’s physical geography is itself
subject to long-term change, and indeed that humanity is dangerously
changing the Earth’s physical geography in the twenty-first century.
Human evolution and the ages of globalization have been fundamen-
tally reshaped by natural changes in the Earth’s physical geography. The
end of the last ice age, paced by changes in the Earth’s orbital charac-
teristics, opened the way for agriculture, sedentism, and civilization itself,
while raising sea levels and thereby submerging the Beringian land bridge
between Asia and the Americas. The drying of the African Sahel during
5000–3000 BCE created the vast Sahara and perhaps caused the densifi-
cation of human settlements along the Nile that gave rise to pharaonic
Egypt. The little ice age in Europe in the 1600s, possibly the result of the
steep decline in the indigenous populations of the Americas in the six-
teenth century that led to reforestation and a reduction of atmospheric
carbon dioxide, may have helped to spur Europe’s Thirty Years’ War and
other political upheavals.8 Other examples of environmental changes and
their impacts on human society include the depletion of soil nutrients by
overexploiting farmlands; the spread of pathogens into new populations;
the human-driven extinctions of plant and animal species (such as the
horse in the Americas); and siltation and other changes in the flow of riv-
ers and the location of natural harbors.
Social institutions, the third fundamental driver of societal change,
include the range of cultural, legal, organizational, and political rules of
daily life. Cultural practices include religious observance, use of languages,
adherence to philosophical ideas, and patterns of gender relations. Legal
practices include commercial law (for establishing businesses and enter-
ing into contracts), private law (for marriage and inheritance), public law
(for public administration), and systems for adjudicating conflicts and
enforcing the laws. Economic organizations include business partner-
ships, corporations, and not-for-profit associations. Political rules, such as
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20
a constitution, define the organization of state power, backed by the state’s
“monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force,” to use Max Weber’s ter-
minology. Institutional innovations are of course essential determinants of
human history. Like technological innovations, they flow across the globe,
carried by migrants, conquering armies, and scholars, diplomats, travelers,
and even spies reporting on developments in other parts of the world.
The Favorable Geographies
Unfair as it is, certain parts of the world have been more favorable for eco-
nomic development than others throughout most ages of globalization.
Eurasia has been advantaged relative to Africa, the Americas, and Ocea-
nia. Temperate climate zones have been favored relative to other climates.
Coastal regions have been favored relative to hinterlands (in the interior of
continents). Places with accessible primary energy resources have also been
advantaged. Let us consider these advantages in turn.
O O O
The Advantages of Eurasia
The Eurasian landmass, combining Europe and Asia, makes up 43 percent
of the world’s land area, not including Antarctica, and is currently home to
around 70 percent of the world’s population. For the past two millennia, it
has consistently been home to around 80 percent of humanity, falling below
75 percent only around 1980. Throughout most of history, until the rise of
the United States in the late nineteenth century, Eurasia consistently led
the world in technological innovations and economic activity. As shown in
figure 1.6, using the production estimates of Angus Maddison, Eurasia
accounted for around 90 percent of world output during the long period
from 1 CE to 1820.9 With the industrialization of the United States after
1820, Eurasia’s share of world production declined to around 58 percent as
of 1950, then rose again with the post–World War II growth of East Asia
and South Asia, reaching around 67 percent in 2008, the last year of Mad-
dison’s data.
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21
During most of human history until very recently, the rest of the
world—the Americas, Africa, and Oceania—were generally far behind the
leaders of Europe and Asia in the deployment of technologies and eco-
nomic development. Once the sea level rose at the end of the last ice age,
the Americas and Eurasia were separated for around ten thousand years,
until Columbus’s voyages. As of 1000 CE, Eurasia had 77 percent of the
world’s population, while the population of the Americas amounted to a
mere 8 percent, far too small and dispersed to develop technologies at any-
where near the pace of Eurasia. Africa’s population was a mere 14 percent
of the world total, and while northern Africa and the Horn of Africa were
actively linked with Eurasia, sub-Saharan Africa was effectively cut off by
the vast desert, not to mention ecological barriers such as endemic malaria
and trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness that afflicts livestock, as well as
people). Oceania, too, was cut off from Eurasia, with a population under 1
percent of the world total.
The United States is the exception that proves the Eurasian rule. Today,
it is the world’s richest economy, but for most of human history, North
America was poor and sparsely settled. North America has unparalleled
geographical bounties: a temperate climate, vast and fertile lands, navigable
rivers, a vast coastline, and enormous mineral and energy resources. Yet
without the benefit of Old World technologies—horsepower, metallurgy,
100
Sh ar
e o
f g lo
b al
G D
P (%
)
90
80
70
60
50
40
30 0 500 1000 1500 2000
Eurasia’s Share of World Product, 1 CE to 2008
Source: Angus Maddison. “Statistics on World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP,
1-2008 AD.” Historical Statistics 3 (2010): 1–36.
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22
wheat cultivation, writing systems, science and mathematics, and more—
economic development stopped at hunting, gathering, and a bit of agricul-
ture. After Columbus’s voyages, North America was increasingly settled by
European colonists, who inflicted horrific violence on the native popula-
tions in the process of spreading across the continent. By the late nine-
teenth century, the United States had become the world’s richest economy,
in line with its geographic bounty. The gains were entirely appropriated by
the European settlers and their descendants.
The Advantages of the Temperate Climate
According to the very useful Köppen-Geiger climate system, the world’s
climates are categorized into six main zones: tropical, dry, temperate, cold,
highland, and polar. The tropical zones are hot year-round, with adequate
rainfall for farming; the dry regions are dry all year long, resulting in des-
erts or grasslands suitable for livestock rearing, but not for much crop
production (except in irrigated river valleys); the temperate zones have
winters and summers, with adequate rainfall for crop production; the
cold regions have long, cold winters; the highlands and polar regions are
sparsely populated, at high elevations or high latitudes (near the North
and South poles).
These climate zones are shown in figure 1.7. Let us start at the equator,
in the tropics (shown in red and pink), and move poleward (toward the
North Pole in the northern hemisphere and the South Pole in the south-
ern hemisphere). We first pass through the dry zones (yellow and beige),
then through the temperate zones (shown in green), then through the cold
zones (shown in blue), and finally to the polar zones (shown in gray). The
highland (or mountainous) regions are shown in darker gray.
The temperate zones, in green, have long enjoyed a remarkable advan-
tage in economic development compared with the other climate zones.
With a mix of summers and winters, and adequate year-round levels of
precipitation, the temperate zones at midlatitudes have been the preemi-
nent regions for grain production (wheat, maize, rice) and mixed farm sys-
tems (combining food crops and farm animals). The temperate climate is
hospitable to horses and other beasts of burden, such as donkeys and oxen.
The winter season breaks the transmission of many vector-borne diseases,
such as malaria. Most of Eurasia’s population has always been concentrated
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23
in the temperate climate zones, notably in eastern China, northern India,
and western Europe.
The Cw temperate monsoon climate deserves special mention. The
monsoon climate, covering much of south, southeast, and east Asia, is
characterized by the wettest months of summer bringing more than ten
times the rainfall of the driest months of winter. The monsoon rains are
the lifeblood of Asia’s highly productive rice-growing agriculture, which
in turn feeds much of humanity. It is because of the temperate-zone mon-
soons of Asia that Southern, Southeastern, and Eastern Asia are home to
55 percent of the world’s population in 2020.
Tropical climates are home to rain forests and savannas, the ancestral
homes of humanity in Africa. Yet the very high year-round temperatures
give rise to many great difficulties for long-term economic development.
These include the difficulties of heavy physical labor at high temperatures;
the year-round transmission of vector-borne diseases in humans, such as
malaria, and in farm animals, such as trypanosomiasis; and the rapid pro-
liferation of pathogens in food and water. Moreover, many tropical soils are
easily depleted of their nutrients as soil organic matter decomposes very
The Köppen-Geiger Climate Classification System
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24
quickly. Throughout history, these tropical disadvantages weighed particu-
larly heavily on Africa, which lies mostly in the tropics.
The dry climate zones are too dry for most crop production except with
irrigation, or the production of short-season, low-yield crops such as sor-
ghum and millet. Population densities are therefore typically low with the
exception of river valleys like the Nile, the Tigris, and the Indus, where the
rivers enable irrigation and also replenish the soil nutrients with alluvium.
Most dryland agriculture other than in the river valleys is based on animal
herding in the wetter part of the drylands, called steppes or grasslands. The
Eurasian steppes were home to the wild horse and were the original sites of
horse domestication. Before the Industrial Age, the steppes were for mil-
lennia the vast east-west “highway” for horse-based transport and commu-
nication, known today as the Silk Road (a name given to these ancient
trade routes in the nineteenth century).
The cold zones have growing seasons that are too short and too cold
to support high-yield crop production, other than some wheat-growing
areas in the more hospitable parts of the cold zones, such as in Canada
and Russia. As with the dry climates, population densities tend to be low.
Other agriculture includes logging, trapping animals for furs, fishing, and
reindeer herding.
Mountain zones are distinctive because of their very high transport
costs and often difficult terrain for crop production because of their alpine
climates and steep slopes, though specialty crops such as coffee and tea
often thrive in such high-elevation zones. More favorably, mountainous
regions are often rich in minerals, and societies in mountain regions often
have a decisive advantage in defending themselves against attackers from
the lowlands. The typical outcomes are a low population density, cultures
that are quite distinct from those of lowland populations, many distinct
languages or dialects within a small geographic area, fierce traditions of
independence, high attractions for mining, and in the twentieth century,
high suitability for low-cost hydroelectric power, as in Switzerland.
Population density is a useful shorthand indicator of the relative agri-
cultural productivity of the different climate zones. Favorable climates
support more people per square kilometer than harsh climates. Let us con-
sider, therefore, Eurasia’s population distribution by climate zone at four
dates: 3000 BCE, 100 CE, 1400, and 2015, as shown in table 1.2. These four
dates have been chosen to represent the end of the Neolithic Age, the
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25
high Classical Age of the Roman and Han empires, the world just before
Columbus, and the modern era. In each period, the population density of
the temperate regions (C climate) was by far the highest, followed by the
tropical regions (A climate), the dry regions (B climate), the highlands and
polar regions (E + H climates), and finally the cold regions (D climate) with
their low crop yields and frigid winters. Even as Eurasia’s overall popula-
tion density rose more than a hundredfold between 3000 BCE and 2015 CE,
from one person per km2 to 94 persons per km2, the relative ranking of den-
sity by climate zone remained the same.
The Advantages of Proximity to Coasts and Rivers
Economic prosperity depends on trade, because no place can produce
on its own the range of goods and services needed for wellbeing. Yet the
feasibility of trade depends on low transport costs. To move bulk freight,
transport by water has long been by far the lowest cost method. Even in
ancient times, grains were shipped across the Mediterranean to feed and
provision the Roman Empire. Overland transport is far more expensive,
taking into account the cost of not only the transport itself (horses, cars,
trucks, rail), but also the necessary infrastructure (roads, rail lines) and
security along the route.
Table
2
3000 100 1400 2015
A 1 4 11 243
B 1 2 3 66
C 2 10 17 252
D 0 1 1 29
E + H 0 2 2 33
Total 1 3 5 94
Source: Author’s calculations using HYDE and CIESIN data. See data appendix for details.
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26
Regions along navigable waterways, including rivers, lakes, and oceans,
have therefore long been favored in economic development. Living far
from waterways has always been a huge disadvantage and living in the
high mountains in the interior of continents has been nearly a sure obsta-
cle to economic development. (The highland civilizations of the Americas
are a partial exception to this rule.) Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations,
famously put it this way:
As by means of water-carriage a more extensive market is opened to
every sort of industry than what land-carriage alone can afford it, so it is
upon the sea-coast, and along the banks of navigable rivers, that indus-
try of every kind naturally begins to subdivide and improve itself, and it
is frequently not till a long time after that those improvements extend
themselves to the inland parts of the country.10
There is another crucial advantage to settlements in river valleys: agri-
cultural productivity. Rivers provide fresh water for irrigation, and in tra-
ditional riverine farm systems, such as along the Nile, the Tigris, and the
Euphrates, annual flooding replenished soil nutrients thanks to the fine-
grained sediments carried by the river flow from the mountains to the
river valleys. The earliest states were formed along riverways, with the dual
benefits of low-cost transport and high food production. In 3000 BCE, for
example, around 30 percent of the Eurasian population lived within twenty
kilometers of a river, though the river valleys constituted only around 18
percent of Eurasia’s land area. Put another way, the population density near
rivers was roughly twice the density farther from rivers.
Indeed, from ancient times until today, most of the world’s major settle-
ments and cities have been built along riverways or ocean coasts. Riverine
cities have been the centers of agriculture, and coastal cities have been the
centers of industry, trade, and innovation and the hubs of global networks
of knowledge and culture. As of 2015, around 38 percent of the world’s pop-
ulation lives within 100km of the oceans and 28 percent live within 20km
of rivers, though the land area near the coasts is only around 20 percent of
the total, and the land around rivers is only around 16 percent of the total.
Throughout the course of civilization, back to at least 3000 BCE, roughly
30 percent of the world’s population has lived near the oceans and another
30 percent or so has lived near rivers.11
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27
The continents differ markedly in their coastal proximity and the
extent of their river basins. In this respect, Europe is especially blessed:
51 percent of Europe’s land area is within one hundred kilometers of the
oceans, and 25 percent of Europe’s land area is within twenty kilometers
of a river. Around 80 percent of Europe’s population lives near a water-
way (2015 data), either a coast or a river. Europe has had the advantage of
a temperate climate and a great proximity to water-based trade. On the
other hand, only around 16 percent of today’s Commonwealth of Inde-
pendent States (CIS), essentially the former Russian Empire, is within
one hundred kilometers of the oceans, and around 19 percent within
twenty kilometers of a river. Only 14 percent of the CIS population lives
near the oceans, while 39 percent live near a river, roughly half in total.
The CIS is northern, cold, and far from ocean sea routes. The rivers and
overland routes, rather than the oceans, have been Russia’s pathways of
trade. These characteristics have long defined Russia’s history. In Asia,
around 40 percent of the population lives near the coasts and another 30
percent near rivers, in between the high coastal proximity of Europe and
the low coastal proximity of the CIS.
The Advantages of Primary Energy Reserves
Economic development is limited by the availability of energy for work,
including for industry (e.g., metallurgy), farm production (e.g., plowing),
transport, and communications. Primary energy resources include biomass,
fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), wind, water, solar, geothermal, nuclear
(uranium), and ocean power. The ability to tap them, of course, depends on
technological know-how. For most of history, energy depended on animal
power and hard human labor, and therefore ultimately on the supply of
foods for human beings and feed grains for beasts of burden. The great
Eurasian empires that conquered on horseback did so, ultimately, based on
the solar energy captured by the vast grasslands that fed the hundreds of
thousands of horses in the conquering cavalries.
From ancient times, such energy was abetted by wind power for sails
and windmills and waterpower to turn waterwheels. From the steam
engine onward, fossil fuels came to economic preeminence in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. Those places lucky enough to have eco-
nomically accessible coal tended to industrialize well before those that
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28
did not. In the twenty-first century, we will have to turn to zero-carbon
energy—wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and ocean—to avoid the great
risks of human-induced global warming caused by the fossil fuels, and
geographical advantages will shift once again. We will also depend on
great advances in technological know-how, such as utilizing solar energy
through photovoltaics.
Geopolitics and Globalization
Since the great dispersal from Africa, and surely before that within Africa,
human groups have battled each other for territory and to secure their
basic survival needs (including water, food supplies, shelter, and minerals).
Indeed, human nature was forged in the cauldron of territorial competi-
tion, which instilled in our genes and our cultures a remarkable capacity to
cooperate within a group, combined with a deeply rooted tendency toward
conflict and distrust between groups (according to race, religion, language,
national origin, and other markers of identity).
Since at least the second millennium BCE, globalization has involved
intense geopolitical, economic, and military competition among rival
empires. The first great Western historian, Herodotus, described the com-
petition between the Greek city-states and the Persian Empire. Since
then, globalization has entailed the rise and fall of competing empires:
Assyria, Macedonia under Alexander the Great, the Hellenistic empires,
Rome, Persia, Chinese dynasties, Indian empires, Arab caliphates, the
European empires, the Soviet Union, the United States. Since around
1600, the European empires increasingly gained sway over other parts of
the world, and during the Industrial Age, Britain and the United States
became global hegemons.
One of the crucial links among geography, technology, and institutions
is the interplay of military technology with physical geography and political
institutions.12 The ages of globalization are marked by technological inno-
vations in the areas of transport, communications, energy, food production,
public health, construction, and others that typically have included signifi-
cant changes in military technologies and relative power. The innovators
have often gained a decisive, albeit temporary, advantage in military force,
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29
which led to upheavals of global power through military conquest. Typi-
cally, the innovations would sooner or later diffuse to the adversaries, often
causing a decisive reversal of fortunes of the conquerors and the conquered.
Of course, military technology is multidimensional and highly com-
plex, involving offense and defense; land, air, and sea; light, heavy, and now
nuclear weapons; tactics, logistics, transport, communications, deception,
psychological warfare, and much more. We will have occasion to mention
some of the key military breakthroughs that helped launch new ages of
globalization. The horse-drawn chariot enabled Mesopotamian cities to
become states and Egyptian kingdoms to unify and control Upper and
Lower Egypt. The Greek and Roman massed infantry, the phalanx, sup-
ported by the cavalry, achieved major victories in land battles. The Mace-
donian phalanx was empowered by the innovation of the sarissa, the long
spear, giving Alexander a decisive advantage in his Asian conquests. Greek
and Roman oar-powered galleys were effective battering rams against
opposing navies. The steppe-region archers sweeping in on horseback
landed decisive blows on opposing infantries.
China’s invention of gunpowder gave rise, centuries later, to the mus-
ket and other firearms that, in turn, decisively ended the advantages of the
archers. The cannon artillery enabled by gunpowder helped to account for
the spectacular successes of the Ottoman, Mongol, and Timurid empires.
When the Atlantic powers, including the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and
English, successfully added cannon power to their ocean vessels, they were
able to dominate the Indian Ocean trade routes. Britain’s early industrial-
ization tremendously spurred its military power, through a steam-powered
navy, mass-produced firearms and heavy artillery, machine guns, logistics
and transport supported by rail and telegraph, and in the early twentieth
century, armored personnel carriers and tanks. The invention of powered
flight in the first decade of the twentieth century led to bombardments by
plane as early as 1912 in the first Balkan War, and then at a much greater
scale in World War I. World War II introduced ballistic missiles and the
atomic bomb in 1945.
A constant theme of history is that major changes in military technolo-
gies almost inevitably lead to deep changes in political institutions, as well.
Larger empires, for example, facilitated by a new military advantage, often
have led to new forms of political control in order to govern a larger popu-
lation and territory. Weapons systems that require vast state outlays have
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30
given advantages to larger states over smaller states. Some military innova-
tions, by contrast, are cost-saving, thereby giving a relative boost to smaller
and poorer nations.
In the early twenty-first century, we are again entering into a new geo-
political era; power is becoming more diffused, most notably with Asia
joining Western Europe and the United States in technological, economic,
and military preeminence. China, India, North Korea, and Pakistan are
nuclear powers. The new age of digital technologies is abetting the global
shift in power relations generally, but also through the advent of new forms
of cyberwarfare.
What is notable about geopolitics is how rapid global change can be.
Empires rise and fall with stunning speed. In 1914, Britain still ruled the
world. By 1960, Britain’s empire had essentially vanished and the Soviet
Union seemed to challenge the United States for hegemonic leadership.
By December 1991, the Soviet Union too had vanished from the map. In
our own time, the rise of China, the rapid growth of India, and the soar-
ing population of Africa all portend a remarkably different world in the
twenty-first century. Bob Dylan’s lyrics certainly ring true:
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.
Looking Back to See Forward
Many of these decisive changes were ushered in by technological changes
that produced new inequalities of power that, in turn, led to new wars. This
is a reality of globalization that must be fundamental to our investigation.
Yet we cannot afford another global war. Our technologies today mean that
another such war could be the end of our species.
We may refer to the wise words of President John F. Kennedy, who
defined our modern existential reality in his 1961 inaugural address: “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.” That is
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31
our own truth about globalization. We cannot afford to have the kinds of
disruptions that we had in the past, lest we lose everything.
With that in mind, I want us to consider three great issues for our time
as we use our backward gaze at history to gain insights for the future. First,
can the world choose a path of shared prosperity, social inclusion, and envi-
ronmental sustainability in this seventh age of globalization? We can call
this the challenge of sustainable development. Second, how should our
global governance be organized if, as seems likely, the Anglo-American age
has ended and we are now in a truly multipolar world? We can call this
the challenge of multilateral governance. Third, is global peace possible,
and if so, on what model of human understanding and ethics could this be
accomplished? We can call this the challenge of universal values.
The successive ages of globalization have expanded our outlook and
our interdependence. We have learned to think globally. By understanding
our common history, and our common vulnerability, we can also grasp our
common interests and values. In that way, we can also find a path to shared
prosperity and peace.
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Our species, Homo sapiens, traces its evolutionary past to around 6 mil-lion years ago in Africa, when our ancestral line of great apes diverged into two branches, one that would evolve into modern humans and the other that would evolve into modern chimpanzees and bonobos. The
human genus Homo emerged around 4 million years ago, when humanity’s
biological ancestors began to walk on two feet. The first great dispersal of
hominins from Africa occurred around 2 million years ago, or even earlier,
when an early Homo species left Africa for Europe and Asia. Premodern
Homo species, including Neanderthals, Denisovans, and others, evolved in
Asia and Europe before the arrival of anatomically modern humans. The
remains of hominin hunters using stone tools hundreds of thousands of
years ago have been found throughout Europe and Asia. This was truly the
first globalization, but not by anatomically modern humans.
The great evolutionary advance of the genus Homo involved a massive
increase in brain capacity, notably in the frontal cortex used for cognition.
This evolutionary process, called encephalization, may have occurred as an
early Homo species learned improved ways to hunt game and cook meat,
giving a boost of concentrated energy that could support larger brains with
greatly increased cognitive power. Hominin brains are voracious users of
energy, not too different from the energy-intensive data centers of the
big-tech companies. The brains of anatomically modern humans, or Homo
2 The Paleolithic Age
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34
sapiens, are around 2 percent of our body mass, but consume around 20 per-
cent of our metabolic energy.
The best evidence suggests that Homo sapiens emerged first on the
African savannah around two hundred thousand years ago, the start of a
period known as the Middle Paleolithic, though we must emphasize that
genetic and fossil discoveries continue to alter the estimated chronology.1
According to the evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson, the fundamen-
tal characteristics of human nature—including our capacity to cooperate
within groups, which he terms eusociality, and our decidedly aggressive atti-
tudes toward out-groups—evolved on the African savannah as a result of
intergroup competition over territory and the resulting group-level natu-
ral selection between competing groups of Homo sapiens. The Paleolithic
humans lived in small foraging bands of perhaps twenty-five to thirty mem-
bers, with seasonally shifting base camps organized around the campfire.2
In Wilson’s view, natural selection endowed humans with behavioral
traits, including language and in-group cooperation, contributing to the
defense of the base camp. Like some insect societies, but unlike other great
apes, Homo sapiens became eusocial, or highly social. At the same time,
in-group sociality was matched by aggression toward out-groups. Coop-
eration within the group was forged by war between groups. Thus, human
cooperation, large brain size, more meat consumption, and campsite-based
hunting societies coevolved to shape our distinctive human nature.
The First Age of Globalization
According to the most recent evidence, Homo sapiens may have begun to
migrate from Africa as early as 180,000 years ago, or perhaps even earlier,
reaching sites along the Red Sea and perhaps the Mediterranean coast of
modern-day Israel.3 Yet it appears that these first migrant groups outside
of Africa did not survive. A second migration, known as the Great Dis-
persal from Africa, began fifty thousand to seventy thousand years ago;
these groups did survive and continued to migrate and expand around the
world. In this great dispersal, humans crossed the Red Sea into Arabia
and crossed the narrow land bridge from Egypt to the eastern Mediter-
ranean. From Arabia and the Levant, early humans spread toward Asia
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35
and Europe, arriving in Europe some forty-five thousand years ago. Along
the way, they encountered other hominins, the now-extinct Neanderthals
and Denisovans.
Figure 2.1 summarizes one recent theory of the Great Dispersal from
Africa. It shows the estimated timing of the arrival of the modern human
species in the Near East 60-60 Kya (thousand years ago), in Europe and
Australasia around 45 Kya, and in the Americas around 15 Kya.4 The pre-
cise dates of the dispersion are still heatedly contested among experts,
with geneticists, anthropologists, archeologists, and others all weighing in
with the respective evidence and techniques. There are still basic questions
as to whether there was one main dispersal or several, whether the descen-
dants of humans who left Africa also returned to Africa in some numbers,
and precisely how and where the modern humans met other hominins
outside of Africa.
When humanity arrived in Australia around 45 Kya, the newly arrived
foragers soon hunted to extinction many of the megafauna—the large
The Human Dispersal in the Paleolithic Period
Source: Brenna M. Henn, L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, and Marcus W. Feldman.
“The Great Human Expansion.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 44
(2012): 17758–64. doi:10.1073/pnas.1212380109.
45 Kya 35–40 Kya
45 Kya
50–60 Kya
15 Kya
60–100 Kya
Founder effect Source of founder effect Migration path
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36
animals weighing more than 44 kilograms.5 Around 85 percent of the con-
tinent’s large mammals went extinct soon after the arrival of humans, as
did a number of birds and reptiles. It is currently debated whether these
extinctions were caused solely by overkill by humans or rather by a mix of
hunting and climate change. Recent evidence puts the blame largely, if not
entirely, on overkill by hunters.6
In the Americas, the same thing occurred roughly 33,000 years later. The
arrival of foragers across Beringia contributed to the extinction of the woolly
mammoth, the mastodon, the Shasta ground sloth, the saber-toothed cat,
and most consequentially, the wild horse. In the Americas, it seems likely
that overhunting and climate change played a synergistic role in the extinc-
tions. The wild horse and the woolly mammoth were most likely driven to
extinction by humans hunting these animals for meat. The extinction of
the saber-toothed cat was possibly more indirect, resulting from a decline
in the saber-toothed cat’s prey caused by human foraging. Other mega-
fauna, including the giant sloth and the mastodon, may have been driven to
extinction not by human hunters but by a sudden cold period known at the
Younger Dryas that occurred toward the end of the Pleistocene, 12,900 to
11,700 years ago, just on the eve of the Holocene.
The extinction of the wild horse was a devastating blow for the Amer-
indian populations.7 It meant that Native Americans would not have the
vast benefits of horses for transport and animal traction for the following
ten thousand years. The next time the native populations encountered the
horse was with the arrival of European conquerors on horseback—but by
then, it was too late. The Europeans arrived with an overwhelming advan-
tage in military power, including horsepower, and with Old World patho-
gens that struck down the natives, enabling small numbers of Europeans to
subjugate the far more numerous native populations.
It also seems likely that the arrival of Homo sapiens led to the rapid
extinction of our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Homo sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted in Europe and Asia for around
ten thousand years, roughly forty thousand to fifty thousand years ago.
The Neanderthals went extinct around forty thousand years ago, but the
precise timing and causes remain a mystery. It seems likely that Homo
sapiens outcompeted the Neanderthals, either directly in combat over ter-
ritory or indirectly by achieving greater successes in hunting and gath-
ering food, thereby depriving the Neanderthals of their subsistence—a
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37
process known to ecologists as competitive exclusion. Neanderthals had
mental abilities and adaptive skills that had enabled them to survive for
hundreds of thousands of years. The precise nature of Homo sapiens’ advan-
tages is uncertain, but they may have included language ability, a greater
ability to handle fire, a greater capacity to cooperate, or other traits. Much
remains uncertain.
What is now certain, though, is that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals
interbred. Neanderthal genes entered into the human genome for popula-
tions living outside of Africa that encountered the European and Asian
Neanderthal populations. Around 2 percent of the genomes of modern
Eurasians are inherited from Neanderthals. Similarly, around 5 percent of
the genomes of indigenous Australasians are inherited from Denisovans,
as are some of the genes of Tibetans, who apparently encountered the
Denisovans high on the Tibetan Plateau.8 Even though only one species of
the genus Homo remains, Homo sapiens, we literally embody our ancestral
relatives as well.
Cultural Acceleration
During the last glacial period, known to Earth-system scientists as the
Upper Pleistocene, Homo sapiens lived in small groups of closely related
individuals. The economy was based on hunting and gathering in a nomadic
setting. Population densities were inevitably very low, perhaps around one
person per square kilometer. During the long haul of that nomadic life,
commencing roughly 50,000 years ago, human societies advanced through
a combination of biological evolution and cultural evolution.
A great acceleration in human cultural development, according to mod-
ern evidence, occurred around this time, the transition from the Middle
Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic Period. The anthropological evidence
suggests the emergence of art, language, and religious practices, or at least a
great advance of such cultural practices. A partial list of significant achieve-
ments dated to around this time includes campsites and settlements, storage
pits, cave paintings and petroglyphs, carvings of figurines, fishing, use of new
materials such as bone, more differentiated toolmaking, body decoration,
and long-distance exchange of precious objects.
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38
The causes of this revolution in culture remain unknown and contested.9
Some neuroscientists speculate that the advent of language and other cultural
breakthroughs depended on biological changes in human neuroanatomy—in
other words, an evolutionary change in the species.10 Other scientists contest
that conclusion, arguing that the Upper Paleolithic revolution was essentially
a cultural revolution, not a biological one, and draw an analogy with the
later Neolithic revolution of agriculture described in the next chapter. The
Neolithic revolution most likely resulted from cultural and ecological factors
rather than any biological changes in humans.
Whatever the causes, humanity achieved a measure of “modernity” in
the Upper Paleolithic, in terms of language, arts, religion, and other aspects
of culture. Human cultures began to flourish. Populations increased, which
may have been both a cause and an effect of the cultural changes. Higher
population densities may have increased the competitive struggle for sur-
vival between competing groups. That intensified competition, in turn,
may have accelerated cultural and biological evolution toward within-
group cooperation. The cultural breakthroughs, in turn, led to many other
advances. Human migrations reached new regions, including farther north
in Eurasia and finally across Beringia or along the Pacific coastal waters
of Beringia and into North America some fourteen thousand to sixteen
thousand years ago.11
Language, we can say with some confidence, was the greatest “techno-
logical” breakthrough of the Upper Pleistocene. It gave rise to a vastly more
complex social life, a societal memory of cultural advances conveyed by word
of mouth across generations, and a growing division of labor within society.
In short, language provided the basis for high within-group sociality, com-
plex cultures, advances in know-how, and intergenerational transmission of
knowledge, all of which have defined our species ever since.
Human Society in the Upper Paleolithic
The contours of human society in the Upper Paleolithic are of great
interest to us. Knowing more about these early societies would help us
understand our core human nature, before the overlays of sedentism, agri-
culture, and modern culture. Most of this prehistory is lost in the mist of
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39
deep time. Nonetheless, intrepid scholars, using the tools of a variety of
disciplines—prehistoric anthropology, archeology, prehistoric linguistics,
genetics, and the anthropology of modern foraging societies—have been
able to make informed judgments about key features of Upper Paleolithic
foraging societies: the size of communities, their internal hierarchical
structures, in-group versus out-group behavior, and war and peace.
Burial evidence, genetic analysis of ancient sites, and the patterns of
modern foraging societies all suggest a hierarchical structure of the com-
munities. The smallest unit is the band, around fifty people, gathered around
the overnight campsite; the next level is the clan, roughly three times the
size, or around 150 people; then comes the mega-band, once again roughly
three times larger, or around five hundred people; and the highest in-group
structure is the tribe, three times larger still, at around 1,500 individuals.
Some scholars have suggested that clan sizes of around 150 reflect human
cognitive constraints on the size of tight-knit groups. Even today, busi-
ness teams and tight-knit social networks are generally of this size. The
evidence from modern foragers and the ancient genomic record of at least
one burial site, Sunghir, Russia, is that clans avoided in-breeding by main-
taining wider social and mating networks.12
Within these societies, the evidence of modern forager societies sug-
gests an egalitarian social structure. Unlike in other primate species, such
as chimpanzees, that have a strong hierarchy of dominant and subordinate
males, the structure of human forager societies appears to be essentially
egalitarian. Gintis and colleagues suggest two main forces at play: the
very strong benefits of cooperation within the clan in hunting, cooking,
food-sharing, and child-rearing; and the widely distributed presence of
lethal hunting weapons, which members of the clan could use to resist any
attempts by individuals to dominate the clan.13 This egalitarianism from
below—the resistance to authority—has been termed a “reverse dominance
hierarchy.” Leaders were most likely still important, but they apparently
had to win their position through persuasion and skills rather than brute
force. According to this view, egalitarianism eventually gave way to hierar-
chical social structures in sedentary societies when the state amassed suf-
ficient power to impose inequalities by force.
As Wilson has emphasized, the strong capacity for in-group coopera-
tion in foraging societies is matched by their potential for extreme violence
against out-groups. Forager groups maintain peaceful and cooperative
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40
networks across tribes, but revert to extreme violence against out-groups
when defending territory. The presence of war is not foreordained but is
contextual, readily arising when a group is under threat. In that circum-
stance, identity politics—belonging to one’s group and fighting the other
group—is part of humanity’s deep human nature.
Some Lessons from the Paleolithic Age
The Paleolithic Age was the formative period for all of human history.
It was the period in which human beings spread from Africa to all parts
of the world, created the first cultures, invented the use of language,
formed clans, and intensified the manipulation of nature, evident in
improved hunting, advances in toolmaking, and the invention of the arts.
Humans adapted to hugely diverse habitats and climate zones and carried
their inventions—both technology and institutions—with them as they
migrated. The evidence, albeit limited, is that these early societies were
egalitarian rather than hierarchical. Moreover, cooperation extended across
networks of foraging tribes, though war would also erupt among compet-
ing groups.
This overview of the Paleolithic Age offers some provisional lessons—
indeed warnings—for us today. It forces us to abandon the quaint and
soothing idea that human beings by our very nature live harmoniously
and sustainably with nature, and that only modern capitalism has created
environmental crises. Even hunter-gatherers, we now realize, were capable
of massive environmental upheavals, to their great subsequent suffering.
When humans populated Oceania fifty thousand years ago and the
Americas some ten thousand years ago, they drove the large land animals
to extinction. They also apparently drove our closest humanity relatives,
the Neanderthals, to extinction as well, either through direct conquest
or through competitive exclusion, beating the Neanderthals to the scarce
resources of food and shelter. We can be our own worst enemy, or at least
our cousins’ worst enemy. Environmental sustainability and peace across
cultures may not come naturally, but must be constructed using our abili-
ties to reason and to look ahead.
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The great dispersal from Africa, and migrations of modern humans across the planet, culminated in the birth of permanent settlements in dispersed villages and the so-called Neolithic revolution—the advent of farming around eleven thousand years ago. Initially, a small proportion of
humanity took up the permanent cultivation of crops. Over time, more and
more of humanity settled in permanent locations for farming, forsaking the
nomadic lives of hunters and gatherers. Thus, the Neolithic Age became the
age of globalization by farming.
The invention of agriculture in Western Asia was preceded by seden-
tism, which began roughly 14,500 years ago. The cause was a warming of
the climate toward the end of the Pleistocene and the start of the Holo-
cene. The rise in temperature increased the availability of food and enabled
communities in the eastern Mediterranean to establish more permanent
settlements even before they cultivated crops. Populations also began to
increase. This early sedentism was apparently partly reversed with one final
cold wave, the Younger Dryas, before the final end of the ice age and the
beginning of the Holocene some 11,600 years ago.
Figure 3.1 shows in green the regions where agriculture first emerged,
in purple where agriculture emerged a bit later, and in brown, where early
agriculture can be biogeographically inferred.1 What do we know about
the rise of agriculture? We know that agriculture was a kind of invention,
3 The Neolithic Age
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42
one that occurred independently in several locations across the inhabited
world. It involved a process of learning how to plant selectively the seeds of
certain wild plant species, mainly grasses, to enable humanity to cultivate
crops rather than simply to gather the natural outputs of these plants.
The near-simultaneous birth of agriculture is a striking case of multiple
parallel discoveries over the course of a few thousand years, roughly coincid-
ing with the end of the ice age. In the Eurasian context, there were two major
early sites. The first was the Fertile Crescent extending from the Egyptian
Nile to present-day Iraq, with wheat cultivation most likely beginning in
southeastern Turkey. The second was China, in the Yellow and Yangtze river
basins, where people began to cultivate millet in the north and rice in the
south. In the Americas, agriculture began with the cultivation of maize in
today’s Mexico and the potato in the highlands of the Andes. Other early
sites that followed include the Ganges River basin, the island of Java (now in
Indonesia), and several locations in Africa and the Americas.
A puzzling and counterintuitive finding, based on archeological and
anthropological evidence, is that hunters and gatherers seem to have had
The Origins of Agriculture
Source: Greger Larson, Dolores R. Piperno, Robin G. Allaby, Michael D. Purugganan,
Leif Andersson, Manuel Arroyo-Kalin, Loukas Barton, et al. “Current Perspectives and the
Future of Domestication Studies.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 17
(2014): 6139-46. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1323964111.
E
H
G
F A
B C
D
Widely accepted centers of independent domestication
Major pathways of diffusion from centers
Early Holocene
Middle Holocene
Biogeographically Inferred
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43
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 early
agricultural populations, as well as advantages of the nomadic life relative
to early farming vis-à-vis disease burden, work effort, and aging. Yet despite
these apparent advantages of a nomadic life, settled agriculture ended up
winning out. The question is why.
Perhaps the key lies in the demographics of nomadism versus farming.
Nomadism supports only a very low population density while farming sup-
ports a far larger population per unit area. Farming, after all, replaces natu-
ral ecosystems with human-made ecosystems that are engineered to yield
far more foodstuffs per unit area. The plant and animal species not culti-
vated on farms are the sure losers, as humanity encroaches on the habitats
of other species that are not directly conducive to food production or that
compete directly with food grains and animal husbandry.
With farm villages supporting, say, ten individuals per square kilome-
ter compared with nomadism that supports, say, one individual per square
kilometer, it seems clear that farm-based communities would be able to
take by force the land once used by nomadic hunters and gatherers. This, of
course, is the history around the world, where hunter and gatherer popula-
tions (such as the Native Americans of the Great Plains) found themselves
forced into smaller and smaller regions by farm communities expanding
into the hunter-gatherer territories by force.
Yet the outcome may have been a lowering of average wellbeing in the
process, perhaps the one described by the biblical “expulsion from Eden,”
in which a life of leisurely foraging in the garden was replaced by a life of
arduous farm labor. God’s punishment to Adam and Eve for eating the
fruit of the tree of knowledge is stated: “By the sweat of your brow you
shall eat bread, Until you return to the ground, from which you were taken.”
If a life of foraging is really better than a life of farm labor, why wouldn’t
humanity find a path back from agriculture to hunting and gathering? The
best guess is that early farm settlements faced a one-way demographic trap.
Here is a simple illustration: Suppose that the first generation of farmers
got a boost from farming. Instead of eating two thousand calories a day
based on four hours a day of hunting and gathering, they enjoyed three
thousand calories a day based on four hours of farming, with each farmer
cultivating, say, two hectares of land. But then, with a sedentary life and
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44
higher caloric intake, fertility rose and infant mortality declined. The popu-
lation doubled, with each household of the next generation having just one
hectare of land. Perhaps the next generation now had to devote six hours
daily to eke out 1,800 calories per day on the one hectare—more work for a
poorer diet than in hunting and gathering.
Yet there would be no going back to nomadic hunting and gathering
according to this example because the local ecosystem cannot support
twice the population of hunters and gatherers. The second generation must
farm merely to stay alive. The nomadic alternative, albeit superior to farm-
ing, would instead become a relic of myth and memory. With the higher
population, Eden cannot be regained. Farming indeed helped the first gen-
eration but cursed the following generations with greater work effort for
less result. And as the sedentary farm populations continued to rise from
one generation to the next, the farm communities continued to encroach
on the lands used by hunter-gathers.
Yet all was not lost. The densely settled farm villages eventually offered
their own novel rewards. Sedentary lives within larger communities set in
train new technological discoveries, in metallurgy, the arts, record keeping,
ceramics, and eventually writing, first in cuneiform and pictographs and
later with alphabets. Sedentary life in this way set off a chain reaction of
endogenous growth, producing a gradual expansion of know-how and an
accompanying increase in population. After some time, perhaps millennia,
the living standards of the settled farm communities eventually outstripped
those of the hunter-gatherer groups, and did so with vastly expanded popu-
lations. According to the HYDE 3.1 population estimates, Eurasia’s popu-
lation rose from just 2 million people around 10,000 BCE to 15 million in
5000 BCE, 60 million in 2000 BCE, and a remarkable 165 million people as
of 1 CE.3 Sedentary lives produced a bounty of food and other products that
supported a hundredfold rise in population over roughly ten thousand years.
After agriculture’s first successes, farming spread gradually to other
regions. Over many millennia, in a process that has lasted until today, the
expansion of farm-based societies squeezed out the places still devoted to
hunting and gathering. There is another great debate about farming: did it
spread through imitation, or did it spread because migrant populations of
farmers displaced the hunter-gatherers?
The answer in Europe seems to be the latter. The provisional evidence
suggests that the early agriculturalists from Anatolia arrived as migrants in
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45
Western Europe around 6000 BCE and largely displaced the local popula-
tions of hunters and gatherers. This is shown by a genetic analysis of the
early farmers found in archeological sites in Europe. Their genes are far
more closely linked to those of the early farmers of Anatolia than to the
genes of the preceding hunter-gatherer populations in Europe.4 That dis-
placement might have come by war or by the spread of pathogens from the
arriving Anatolians and their farm animals to the hunter-gatherer popula-
tions who, not having been raised in the presence of these diseases, would
not have acquired immunity to them.
This is not the end of the population story, however. It appears from the
genetic record that Europe incurred a second massive upheaval with the
arrival of populations on horseback from the Eurasian steppes, beginning
around 3000 BCE with the Yamnaya people, who once again seem to have
replaced large portions of the indigenous populations they encountered.
There is a mystery as to how a small number of pastoralists from the steppes
replaced the large number of sedentary farmers they found upon their
arrival in Europe. One possibility recently uncovered in the genetic record
is that the Yamnaya may have carried Yersinia pestis, the plague, with them.5
By 3000 BCE, small farm communities were strewn across all of the
continents (save Antarctica). The vast majority of lives were lived within
the narrow confines of these villages. Technological learning occurred, as
did the gradual diffusion of new techniques, such as ceramics, early metal-
lurgy, crop cultivation, domestication of farm animals, and cultural and
religious practices. People could move long distances on foot, in horse-
drawn carts, or by boat. Yet long-distance trade was still minimal, and the
long-distance diffusion of techniques occurred over centuries and millen-
nia, not years or decades.
Diffusion of Agriculture Within Ecological Zones
The diffusion of agricultural know-how is guided strongly by geography
because specific crops have distinctive ecological ranges. Crops like wheat
can grow only in cool places, not in the tropics. Grains such as rice grow
especially well in the subtropics, notably in monsoon environments with
plentiful freshwater for flooded fields. Maize, with its C4 photosynthesis
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46
pathway, began as a subtropical grain. Within these ecological niches, tech-
nological diffusion occurs through migration of farmers, the spread of crop
varieties, and imitation.
The diffusion of early agriculture naturally occurred within ecological
zones, according to where specific farm techniques could spread. The larg-
est contiguous zone of shared agriculture potential is the east-west axis of
Eurasia, a wheat-growing belt that stretches ten thousand kilometers from
the Atlantic coast of Portugal to the Pacific coast of China.
Jared Diamond, one of the great modern explicators of economic history
and economic development, has emphasized in his wonderful book Guns,
Germs, and Steel that Eurasia’s long east-west axis facilitated the dissemi-
nation of technologies within ecological zones.6 Wheat, which emerged
originally in the Fertile Crescent (in today’s Turkey, Iraq, and eastern Med-
iterranean), diffused west into Europe and east into Asia. Horse domestica-
tion, which emerged first in the Pontic-Caspian region (spanning the Black
Sea and the Caspian Sea north of the Caucasus), diffused west into Europe
and east into China. The Mediterranean basin offered a shared ecology for
wheat, olives, vineyards, horses, donkeys, and other farm animals for the
Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires and the Muslim caliphates.
The Americas and Africa, by contrast, lie on mostly north-south axes,
meaning that technological breakthroughs had a more difficult time dis-
seminating across ecological zones. Consider the case of the llama and
alpaca of the high Andes region of South America. These camelids were
the only pack animals available to the Amerindians between the extinc-
tion of the horse some ten thousand years ago and the arrival of the Euro-
pean conquerors around 1500 CE. Yet they did not diffuse out of the Andes
because of their limited ecological extent. Unlike the east-west Eurasian
steppes, the Andean highlands could not offer an animal-based highway
system for the north-south Americas.
The Early Alluvial Civilizations of Eurasia
Five early agricultural regions in Eurasia made fundamental and lasting
contributions to technology, institutions, culture, and governance for all
of humanity: ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Yellow
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47
River, and the Yangtze River. These early civilizations shared fundamental
similarities. All were based on alluvial farming, wherein the rich soils of a
river basin were replenished by seasonal flooding that delivered new topsoil
and nutrients each year. On the basis of these productive soils, along with
the other advantages of the riverine location in terms of transport, irriga-
tion, and defense, the world’s first city-states and then empires developed
at these sites.7 In the Americas, similar developments took place along riv-
ers in the Peruvian Andes and in Mesoamerica.
The common features of the Egyptian and Eurasia riverine civiliza-
tions are striking. They arose and advanced roughly from 5000 to 3000 BCE.
All were based on alluvial farming. In the case of Egypt, the Indus Val-
ley, and the Yellow River, the river runs through a dry climate, making the
river indispensable for irrigation. These rivers are dependent on the annual
monsoon rains, which themselves are highly variable across seasons and at
scales of centuries and millennia. Long-term changes in monsoon patterns
paced by changes in the Earth’s orbit, have had long-term consequences for
the prosperity and decline of riverine civilizations.8
Each of the five riverine civilizations of the Old World used domes-
ticated animals for food, transport, and traction. (In the Americas, the
Andean civilizations relied on South American camelids, alpacas and lla-
mas, as pack animals, while Mesoamerica lacked any large animals for pack
or draft work.) In ancient Egypt, the domesticated donkey was used as
early as 5000 BCE as a pack animal for desert transport between the Nile
and the Red Sea, while oxen were used as draft animals. In Mesopotamia,
between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the ancient civilizations of Akka-
dia and Assyria in the third millennium BCE similarly used donkeys and
oxen as beasts of burden. Each of these civilizations used sailboats to navi-
gate the river. All developed methods of irrigation and flood control; they
were later termed “hydraulic civilizations” for their advanced technologies
of water management.
These civilizations also invented forms of writing that became the pre-
cursors of modern scripts. The oldest writing systems in Mesopotamia date
from the use of pictographs around 3500 BCE and then the great break-
through to cuneiform around 2500 BCE. Hieroglyphics in the Nile River
valley date from around 3100 BCE, possibly influenced by Sumerian writing
or possibly an independent invention. Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian
hieroglyphics likely contributed to the later Phoenician writing system that
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The Neolithic Age
48
in turn was adapted to become the Greek alphabet, the world’s first alpha-
bet with distinct characters for vowels as well as consonants. Chinese char-
acters date from the second millennium BCE during the Shang Dynasty
that controlled parts of the Yellow and Yangtze river valleys. In the Ameri-
cas, Mayan writing began much later, with the earliest inscriptions dating
from around 300 BCE.
The riverine civilizations are striking and vivid cases of the role of physical
geography in economic development. The rivers served multiple indispens-
able purposes: soil replenishment, irrigation and freshwater management,
aquatic-based nutrition, transport by ship, and military defense. They allowed
astounding growth in the size and density of populations at a remarkably
early period of civilization, with civilizations reaching several hundred
thousand people in a number of city-states. In turn, the high productivity
of agriculture, which supported these large populations, also made possible a
sophisticated division of labor, the development of writing systems, the rise
of scientific knowledge (mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy, agronomy),
and the novelty of governance of large populations.
The Lucky Latitudes
The temperate-zone east-west swath of Eurasia has enjoyed a distinctive
role throughout history. Some of Eurasia is desert and almost uninhabited.
Some is tundra, frozen throughout the year, with very small populations
herding reindeer in the far north. Most of Eurasia’s population has lived in
a subtropical band of latitude and climate zone that historians including
Ian Morris have christened “the lucky latitudes.”9 They are lucky because
they have been home to humanity’s greatest technological and economic
progress. I will define the lucky latitudes as the area from 25 degrees north
to 45 degrees north in Eurasia, as shown in figure 3.2.
The lucky latitudes so defined constitute 28 percent of the land area of
the Old World but have long been home to a far higher share of the popu-
lation. In 100 CE, for example, the lucky latitudes were home to 64 percent
of the total Old World population. Within Europe, the lucky latitudes are
30 percent of the land area but were home to 48 percent of Europe’s popu-
lation in 100 CE; in Africa, the lucky latitudes are 14 percent of the land but
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49
were home to 52 percent of the population; and in Asia, the lucky latitudes
are 58 percent of the land but were home to 71 percent of the population.10
(Data may be found in the appendix.)
Notice that the lucky latitudes also cover most of today’s United States.
Yet, as noted earlier, North America was not as lucky as Eurasia for most
of economic history. For around ten thousand years, the Americas were
cut off from the technological advances in Eurasia, until the Americas
and the Old World were rejoined by trade and migration in the 1500s.
After that, remarkable economic development of North America ensued,
but in the context of brutal wars of conquest and genocide of the Native
American populations.
Within the Eurasian lucky latitudes, countless innovations not only
arose but also diffused throughout the long east-west band. The lucky lati-
tudes shared a common and relatively hospitable climate, transport routes,
and the absence or low intensity of tropical vector-borne diseases such as
malaria, though bubonic plague was episodically transported long distances
The Lucky Latitudes and Climate Zones
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50
across the region. The lucky latitudes of Eurasia have long shared common
crops, horse-based transport, sailing vessels in the Mediterranean and the
Indian Ocean, a shared language Indo-European language family, long-
distance migrations of populations, the flow of ideas, and long-distance
overland trade stretching ten thousand kilometers from the west of Europe
to the eastern seaboard of China.
In the Americas, higher population densities and greater technologi-
cal development were concentrated more toward the equator, in the region
from the Valley of Mexico through Central America and to the Andes
of South America. This region was home to the great civilizations of the
Olmecs, Mayas, Toltecs, and Aztecs of Mesoamerica and the Incas of
the Andes. These civilizations produced wondrous advances in agriculture,
stone construction, astronomy, and calendric and writing systems, yet they
lagged far behind their contemporaries in the Eurasian lucky latitudes. The
American civilizations had writing systems but no alphabets, lacked draft
animals other than the llama of the Andean highlands, used no wheeled
vehicles, and arrived much later than Eurasia to metallurgy.
The lucky latitudes of Eurasia are congenial for both animal husbandry
and staple crop production, thanks to a Goldilocks climate: neither too cold,
as in the higher latitudes nearer the poles, nor too hot, as in the equatorial
tropics. These midlatitudes have growing seasons that are long enough to
support high crop yields but are cold enough in the winters to break the
transmission of vector-borne diseases such as malaria. The lucky latitudes
do have seasonal transmission of malaria, but not the year-round crushing
burden of tropical Africa. And luckily for Eurasia, trypanosomiasis, which
kills domesticated animals as well as humans, is restricted to tropical ranges
in Africa and Latin America (where it is known as Chagas disease).
The lucky latitudes were the site of early technological innovations and
long-distance diffusion. Early technologies adopted by 3000 BCE included
metallurgy (the Copper Age was underway and the Bronze Age was
beginning); early writing such as hieroglyphics in Egypt, proto-cuneiform
in Mesopotamia, and early pictographs in China; animal husbandry; the
earliest domestication of the donkey and horse; pottery; viticulture (as early
as 5000 BCE in the Caucasus region, present-day Georgia); and even the
wheel and chariot. These technological advances outstripped contempo-
raneous developments in the Americas, Oceania, and Africa south of the
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51
Sahara, where the innovations arose much later or arrived through diffu-
sion from the lucky latitudes.
Not all parts of the lucky latitudes are equally blessed. Looking at the
map in figure 3.2, we see that the western (Europe) and eastern (China)
ends of the lucky latitudes are temperate regions while the middle stretch
from Western Asia to Central Asia are drylands. The great empires of
Western and Central Asia—the Persian, the Mongol, the Timurid—were
dryland empires with relative low population densities (but lots of horses
and grazing areas). The temperate-zone empires, such as the Roman and
Han empires, were far more populous and, in general, far more technologi-
cally dynamic.
Interestingly, the lucky latitudes maintained their good luck even
during the fossil-fuel era of the past two centuries. By sheer accident of
geology, the lucky latitudes contain major geological reserves of coal. The
reason is coincidental: Around 100 million years ago, much of today’s
lucky-latitude land was tropical swampland. Dead plant and animal debris
were submerged in the swampland and, during the passage of geologi-
cal time, transformed into coal—the fuel that would eventually power the
industrial revolution.
Some Lessons from the Neolithic Age
Luck matters. In many ancient languages, the word for happiness is the
same as the word for luck or good fortune. Being in the right place at the
right time is sometimes the key to success. In the Neolithic Age, being
in the right place at the right time was indeed critical. Early agriculture
depended on a fertile environment, notably in alluvial floodplains, and
with the flora and fauna that were the precursors to cultivated crops and
domesticated animals. The long east-west extent of Eurasia’s lucky latitudes
meant that there was a vast area for both innovation and diffusion, giving
rise to early civilizations and the proto-states that would emerge in the
next age of globalization. The Americas also had their lucky sites, nota-
bly in Mesoamerica and along the Andes coastlines of present-day Peru.
But the bad luck of the Americas was to be cut off from the technological
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52
advances of the far more populous Old World and to lack vital resources,
such as domesticated large animals like the donkey and the horse, that
would prove pivotal for long-term economic advancement. Africa too was
deeply disadvantaged, largely cut off from Eurasia by the vast Sahara Des-
ert and burdened by an exceptionally severe disease environment for both
humans and farm animals.
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As a contiguous land area that has been home to most of humanity, Eurasia has long enjoyed the benefits of scale, long-distance trade, and the innovation and diffusion of technologies. For at least five thousand years, the horse has played a key, even decisive, role in Eurasia’s
development, offering unequalled transport services, horse power for agri-
culture, powerful military capacity, rapid communications, and the capacity
to govern large areas in a unified state. This is why the domestication of
the horse some fifty-five hundred years ago gave rise to the first empires of
Eurasia, and also why I have chosen the Equestrian Age as the name of the
third age of globalization.
Our examination of this age of globalization begins with the band of
grasslands just to the north of the lucky latitudes known as the steppes
of Asia (figure 4.1). These great grasslands include the western Eurasian
steppes, spanning the northern Black Sea coast, the Caucasus Mountains,
today’s Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and the eastern Eurasian steppes,
notably Mongolia and northern China, including Xinjiang, Inner Mon-
golia, and parts of northeast China. The steppes, classified as climate zone
BS, are semiarid but not desert. This climate zone accounts for around
10.8 percent of the land area of Eurasia, and was home to a somewhat
larger proportion of the population, around 15.1 percent in 3000 BCE and
14.5 percent in 1000 BCE.
4 The Equestrian Age
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54
The steppes provided the abundant energy input—grass—and the
hospitable climate for the most important transport vehicle for almost
all of human history: the horse. The steppes also served as the great long-
distance highways connecting Eurasia well before paved roads. Horse-
driven transport was, in effect, the automobile, truck, railroad, and tank of
the ancient empires. It was the only available high-speed option for land-
based movements of traders, messengers, warriors, and explorers.
Animal Domestication
To understand the significance of the horse’s arrival in human history, let
us start with animal domestication more generally. Animal domestication
was a long and complex process, starting in the Paleolithic Age with the
Eurasian Steppe Region
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55
domestication of the dog (around fifteen thousand years ago in China)
and continuing in the Neolithic Age over many thousands of years. The
archeological evidence suggests that the ruminants (goats, sheep, and
cattle) were originally domesticated during the period from 10,000 to
8000 BCE in southwest Asia. The donkey was domesticated (from the
African wild ass) in Egypt around 5000 BCE. Dromedary camels were
domesticated in Arabia around 4000 BCE, and camelids (alpaca and llama)
in the high Andes around the same time. Horses were domesticated late
in the Neolithic, around 3500 BCE, in the western Eurasian steppes, the
region spanning the north coast of the Black Sea, the northern Caucasus,
and western Kazakhstan.1
Here is a staggering reality: The domestication of animals occurred almost
exclusively in Eurasia and North Africa (in the case of the donkey). No large
farm animals were originally domesticated in tropical Africa. Africa’s own
ungulates, including antelope and zebras, resisted domestication. Domesti-
cated sheep and goats arrived to Africa from Southeast Asia, horses from
the western Eurasian steppes, cattle from Southwest Asia, the dromedary
from the Arabian Peninsula, and the donkey from North Africa.
In general, the African tropical environment proved extremely harsh
for many farm animals. Cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, horses, and donkeys
were vulnerable to trypanosomiasis within the vast tsetse belt of West
and Central Africa (figure 4.2) and to other diseases such as the tick-
borne east coast fever, caused by the protozoan pathogen Theileria parva,
equine piroplasmosis, also transmitted by ticks, and African horse sick-
ness, an orbivirus transmitted by insect vectors. Many domesticated ani-
mals did successfully adapt to the tropical African environment, at least
in some places, and many African regions have had mixed crop-and-
animal farm systems for thousands of years. Nonetheless, much of tropi-
cal Africa long suffered from the scarcity of horses, donkeys, and other
pack and draft animals.2
The situation in the Americas was even more dramatic. Most domesti-
cated animals reached the New World only upon the Columbian exchange
of flora and fauna between the Old World and New World after 1492,
when the Old World farm animals arrived with European conquerors. The
hunter-gatherers of North America killed off the wild horse (Equus occi-
dentalis) and other megafauna, including the woolly mammoth, and saber-
toothed cat.3 The only surviving candidates for domestication were the two
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56
camelid species of the high Andes (the llama and the alpaca), two birds
(the turkey and the Muscovy duck), and the guinea pig. Other than llamas
and alpacas in the high Andes, the Amerindian populations had to make
do for more than ten thousand years with no large domesticated animals
for pack and draft work and without horses for long-distance transport
and communications. The early extinction of the horse in North Amer-
ica was therefore a loss to the Amerindian civilizations of catastrophic
dimension. The next time that Amerindians encountered the horse was
when the Spanish conquistadores showed up on horseback at the end of
the fifteenth century.
Tsetse infested areas
Cattle distribution
Tsetse infested areas
Cattle distribution
Tsetse-Infested Areas of Africa
Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1998, G. Uilenberg,
A field guide for The Diagnosis, Treatment and Prevention of African Animal Trypanosomosis,
www.fao.org/3/X0413E/X0413E00.htm#TOC. Reproduced with permission.
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57
Domestication of the Donkey and the Horse
The horse is unmatched in its importance for economic development and
globalization. Only the horse offered the speed, durability, power, and
intelligence to enable deep breakthroughs in every sector of the econ-
omy: farming, animal husbandry, mining, manufacturing, transport, com-
munications, warfare, and governance. Regions of the world that lacked
horsepower fell far behind those that had it, and typically ended up
being conquered by warriors on horseback. That ancient story was played
out repeatedly in East Asia, South Asia, West Asia, Europe, Africa, and
the Americas.
The horse is one of subgenera of the genus Equus, the others being the
African ass, the Asian ass (onager), the Tibetan ass (kiang), and several
subgenera of zebras. The native range of the horse, based on its distribution
in the late Pleistocene, is shown in figure 4.3. In the late Pleistocene, the
horse was native to most of the Americas and Eurasia other than South
The Distribution of Wild Horses in the
Late Pleistocene–Early Holocene
Source: Pernille Johansen Naundrup and Jens-Christian Svenning, “A Geographic Assessment
of the Global Scope for Rewilding with Wild-Living Horses (Equus ferus),” PLoS ONE 10(7):
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0132359
Mid/late Holocene Latest Pleistocene/early Holocene
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58
Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and Southeast Asia. Horses were present in
Africa only at the very northern tip of the continent, in the small temper-
ate band north of the Sahara.
Figure 4.3 depicts the remarkable decline in the range of horses between
the late Pleistocene (light) and the mid/late Holocene (dark). The main
reason is that horses were hunted for meat in the early Holocene and driven
to extinction throughout the Americas and in most of Eurasia other than
the steppe region. The steppes, which were remote from the more popu-
lous concentrations of hunter-gatherers and early farmers, offered a refuge
for the wild horse. It was therefore from the steppes that the horse would
reemerge as the key technology for war and empire some eight thousand
years after the start of the Neolithic period.
Of the other subgenera of the genus Equus, only the African wild ass
was domesticated. The Asian and Tibetan asses and the various subgen-
era of zebras all proved resistant to domestication. The native range of the
African wild ass was the drylands and deserts of North Africa and the
Arabian Peninsula. Its domestication appears to have originated around
5000 BCE in Nubia, today’s southern Egypt, perhaps 1,500 years before the
domestication of the horse.
While cattle served as slow-moving beasts of burden (draft animals),
donkeys served mainly as pack animals, carrying heavy loads. A recent
study of early donkey domestication explains their pivotal role this way:
Donkeys are tough desert-adapted animals, and their ability to carry
heavy loads through arid lands enabled pastoralists to move farther and
more frequently and to transport their households with their herds.
Domestication of the donkey also allowed large-scale food redistribution
in the nascent Egyptian state and expanded overland trade in Africa and
western Asia.4
The domestication of the wild horse (Equus ferus) followed that of the don-
key around 3500 BCE. Domestication occurred as farmer-herders pushed
north from Mesopotamia into the western Eurasian steppes. There they
encountered the surviving feral horses. The horse was clearly not easy to
domesticate, and the process took a considerable amount of time. The
horse is fast and aggressive and ready to attack if cornered. It was probably
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59
first cornered, trapped, and subdued in group hunts. The initial purpose
of domestication seems to have been to use the horse as a pack animal to
carry loads across the grasslands. What ensued was several millennia of
gradual technological developments and adaptations for the effective use
of horses, including the gradual improvement of halters to harness loads,
saddles, stirrups, types of carts and chariots, and weapons that could be
deployed by riders in combat. The sites shown in figure 4.4 are the steppe
regions with early horse domestication.5
The result of horse domestication is an animal of remarkable versa-
tility. It is a pack animal, able to transport goods long distances. It is a
saddle animal, for use in warfare and farming (as in the herding of farm
animals). It is a draft animal, able to pull wheeled vehicles. It has endur-
ance, intelligence, and great speed. In short, it has played a decisive role in
economic development.
Early Locations of Horse-Based Societies
Source: Pita Kelekna, The Horse in Human History, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Anyang
LoyangChangan CherchenVakhsh
Bishkent
Harappa
Ecbatana
SusaBabylon Memphis
Carthage
Khvalynsk Syezzhe Sintashta
Petrovka
Botai
Tazabagyab
Namazga
Dashly 3
Sergeivka Krivoe Ozero
Varfolomievka
Utyevka
Rome
Kadesh Sardis
Troy
Varna
Nineveh
Maikop
Repin Sredni Stog
Dereivka
Lchashen
Thebes
Athens
Uruk Persepolis Mohenjo-daro INDO-ARYAN
IRANIAN
ACHAEMENID
FATYANOVO
HITTITE
BADEN
CORDED WARE
BEAKER
BALKANS Qawrighul
Pazyryk
Arzhan
Panyu
TOCHARIAN
A FA N A S I E V O
P A M I R S
S A Y A N
H I M
A L A Y A S
T I A N S H A N
CAUCASUS
AL PS
CARPATHIANS
U R
A L
S
A L
T A
I
Initial Horse Domestication 4 M BC Afanasievo 3600–2400 BC Baden 3600–2800 BC Corded Ware 3200–2300 BC Fatyanovo 3200–2300 BC Beaker 2600–1900 BC Tocharian 2000 BC Indo-aryan 1900 BC Hittite 1800 BC Iranian 1000 BC Anyang (Shang) steppe horse chariotry 1180 BC Achaemenid 550 BC
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60
The Domestication of the Camel and Camelids
Species of the camel family (Camelidae) have also played an important role
in the more extreme climates of deserts and high plateaus. In the Old World,
two species predominate: the one-humped dromedary of the Arabian Penin-
sula and North Africa, and the two-humped Bactrian camel of Central Asia,
including Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. In the
New World, two wild Andean camelids, the guanaco and vicuna, were domes-
ticated to the llama and the alpaca, respectively. All of these species have
played an important economic role, though to a lesser extent than the horse.
The Old World camels are distinctive for their ruggedness and abil-
ity to endure extreme temperatures, hot in the case of the dromedary and
cold in the case of the Bactrian. Camels can go long periods, even weeks
under certain circumstances, without drinking, and their humps store fat
for long periods without food. Crucial as pack animals through deserts and
high-steppe regions, they played an integrative role in long-distance trade
as early as ancient pharaonic Egypt. The Old World camels were domesti-
cated later than the horse, probably between 2000 and 1000 BCE.
The camel played multiple roles: as a source of milk and meat; as a pack
animal in long-distance caravans across the Arabian Peninsula, the Egyp-
tian desert west of the Nile, and later the Sahara Desert; as a battle ani-
mal; and as an animal for sport racing. The camel’s ability to carry heavy
loads of up to five hundred pounds for fifteen to twenty miles per day over
the course of a hundred days meant that camel transport across the Ara-
bian Peninsula between Asia and the Mediterranean was competitive with
travel by sea. The camel was also an important complement to the warhorse
in Bedouin campaigns of raiding and conquest. Although camels could not
stand up to horses in shock combat, they could powerfully aid the cavalry
by carrying war supplies and water over large distances. One scholar sum-
marizes the camel’s role in Mideastern nomadic societies as follows:
It seems clear the camel is the key without which there could have been
no nomads in the hot deserts of the Old World. This one domestic ani-
mal provided food, transportation, and a basis for military power, and
continued to do so under conditions no other animal of comparable
capabilities could endure.6
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61
The Andean camelids, the llama and the alpaca, were domesticated in
the high Andes around 3000 BCE. The llama, the larger of the two species,
served as a pack animal as well as a source of wool for coarse fabrics, milk,
meat, and hides. The alpaca, smaller and with long, finer fibers, was used to
produce fine fabrics, as well as for milk, meat, and hides. Recent research
suggests that agriculturalists in the high Andes engaged in mixed-crop and
animal-husbandry agriculture and that the llama served also as a vital pack
animal for exchange between the highlands and the coastal lowlands of
Peru. These camelids, the dog, and the guinea pig were the only domesti-
cated animals available in the Andes.
The Metal Ages
Alongside the domestication of the horse, donkey, and camel, the advance
from the Neolithic Age to the Equestrian Age occurred on other fronts
as well. Most importantly, the New Stone Age gave way to the Metal
Age, making possible new and stronger tools, weaponry, and artisanal
products. The Copper Age commenced around 4000 BCE, though cop-
per ornaments are known from earlier millennia. Copper is widely acces-
sible in elemental form and can be melted at a relatively low temperature,
1085ºC. Smelting of copper ores requires a higher temperature, around
1200ºC. These temperatures are hotter than campfires and therefore
required new methods of heating.
Copper is relatively soft in pure form; it becomes stronger and more
durable as an alloy with tin, making brass, or with arsenic (though dan-
gerous in the metalworking). The Bronze Age arrived with the discovery
of the copper-tin alloy, beginning around 3300 BCE in the Near East, the
Indus Valley, and the Yellow River valley. The problem with bronze was
the scarcity of tin. There were few accessible tin deposits in the region
of the Fertile Crescent. Tin mines were established in parts of Western
Europe (Germany, Iberia), but the tin had to be transported long dis-
tances to the Near East. Other tin arrived from mines in Central Asia
along the Silk Road.
Iron is superior to bronze in many ways, notably in strength per unit
weight. Iron is also far more plentiful than tin. The problem with iron,
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62
however, is its very high melting point, around 1530ºC, almost 500ºC higher
than copper. The vast amount of energy needed to melt iron ores drastically
limited the large-scale production of iron products and delayed the onset
of iron production. The Iron Age commenced around 1500 BCE, roughly
1,800 years after the start of the Bronze Age.
Comparing Old World and New World Developments
The extinction of the wild horse in the early Holocene meant that the
Amerindians were bereft of horses until the arrival of the European con-
querors. Nor did they have the benefit of the donkey, which originated
in North Africa and did not arrive to the Americas until the Colombian
exchange. The absence of equids certainly did not stop many remarkable
advances of civilization in the Americas, but it did fundamentally alter, and
limit, the civilizational advances that occurred. The Americas lacked the
potential for long-distance overland transport, communications, agricul-
tural productivity, and aspects of large-scale governance made possible by
the horse and donkey. The llama served this purpose, but only to a limited
extent, in connecting the high Andes with the lowlands of Peru.
The implications were profound, as cogently argued by the anthropolo-
gist Pita Kelekna in her magisterial account of The Horse in Human History.
I summarize her conclusions in table 4.1, comparing long-term develop-
ment in Eurasia and the Americas, the first benefiting from the horse and
the latter bereft of the horse.
The Yamnaya Breakthrough in Eurasia
Perhaps the first major horse-based society in Eurasia was the Yamnaya
people, hypothesized to have emerged as an admixture of hunter-gatherers
from the Caucasus and Eastern Europe. Their territory was the north-
ern Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea (known as the
Pontic-Caspian Steppe). What is notable about the Yamnaya civilization,
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63
dated around 3500–2400 BCE, is their early domestication of the horse and
their apparent remarkable success in migrating westward toward Europe.
The Yamnaya civilization is closely linked in technologies and genetics to
the so-called Corded Ware culture of northern Europe around 3000 BCE
(named for the corded decoration of its pottery). Paleo-geneticists sug-
gest that much of Europe’s population in fact reflects the admixture of two
populations: the first originating with early farmers from Anatolia and the
second with the Yamnaya people, itself an admixture of hunter-gatherer
populations.7 The hypothesized dual origin of early Western European
farm populations is illustrated in figure 4.5, showing two key migrations
into Western Europe, the first from Anatolia dated around 7500–6000 BCE
and the second from the steppes, dated around 4000–3000 BCE.
Table
Agriculture American steppes (prairies and pampas) remained most
undeveloped and unpopulated
Adoption of agriculture throughout the steppes, intensification in the
temperate zones
Metallurgy Little transport of metals, very slow uptake and diffusion of
metallurgy
Long-distance transport of metals, more rapid diffusion of metallurgy
Trade Short-distance trade Long-distance trade, with horse- based trade encouraging other
modes as well (e.g., canal building)
Diffusion of ideas and inventions
Little diffusion of technologies such as writing, counting
devices, arithmetic (e.g., role of zero)
Extensive diffusion of technologies, including alphabets, arithmetic, use
of the wheel
Warfare Small polities, governed as confederations
Large empires, secured by horseback
Religion Little diffusion Long-distance diffusion
Language Little linguistic interaction Long-distance linguistic interaction
Source: Data from Pita Kelekna, The Horse in Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009
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64
In support of the hypothesized migrations from the western steppes,
archeologists point not only to the genetic record but also to the remarkable
and rapid dissemination of major horse-related technologies—including
the wheel, ox-driven carts, and depictions of horseback riding—through
the vast area of Mesopotamia, Eastern Europe, northern Europe, and the
Indus region. The domestication of the horse, with the unmatched mobility
that it brought, enabled a dissemination of basic technologies over a huge
area of Eurasia at a speed that was unprecedented in comparison with prior
human experience.
One other fundamental cultural breakthrough apparently arrived with
the Yamnaya and related peoples: Indo-European languages. As with the
genetic code, the language code of western Eurasia and South Asia sug-
gests a crucial admixture of languages from Anatolia and the western
steppes, which together gave birth to the Indo-European languages, the
family of almost all of today’s European languages (other than Basque,
Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian) and many of the languages of western
Rival Hypotheses: Neolithic Age Migrations from the Steppes
and from Anatolia
Source: Wolfgang Haak, Iosif Lazaridis, Nick Patterson, Nadin Rohland, Swapan Mallick,
Bastien Llamas, Guido Brandt, et al. “Massive Migration from the Steppe Is a Source for
Indo-European Languages in Europe.” bioRxiv (2015): 013433. doi:10.1101/013433.
Yamnaya
Corded Ware
Black Sea
Steppe Hypothesis 4000 – 3000 BCE
Anatolian Hypothesis 7500 – 6000 BCE
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65
Asia and northern India. Paleogeneticist David Reich offers a fascinating
hypothesis based on the genetic record:
This suggests to me that the most likely location of the population
that first spoke an Indo-European language was south of the Cauca-
sus Mountains, perhaps in present-day Iran or Armenia, because ancient
DNA from people who live there matches what we would expect for a
source population both for the Yamnaya and for Ancient Anatolians.8
Reich also describes how the genetic record in India suggests that present-
day Indians are an admixture of two ancestral populations, from northern
India and southern India, with the northern Indian ancestral population
genetically related to the populations of the Eurasian steppes, the Cauca-
sus, and the Near East (Anatolia).
The Early Equestrian States
From the original domestication in the Pontic-Caspian steppes, the horse
and horse-based civilizations spread throughout the temperate and steppe
regions of Eurasia. The Eurasian steppes would remain regions of low popu-
lation density in fierce, horse-based warrior societies. Their names would be
dreaded among the sedentary societies of Eurasia, North Africa, the Mid-
dle East, South Asia, and East Asia for 3,500 years, from roughly 2000 BCE
to 1500 CE. The first groups included the Hyksos, who conquered ancient
Egypt around 1580 BCE and ruled for around 130 years, and the Scythians,
who controlled parts of the ancient land routes between Asia and Europe
from around 900 BCE to 400 CE. Later steppe conquerors include the Goths
and Huns, between 400 and 600 CE; the Magyars and Bulgars, who settled
Hungary and Bulgaria around 1000 CE; and the Seljuks and Mongols, who
conquered vast territories of Asia from 1200 to 1400 CE.
The horse was also adopted by the far more populous agricultural soci-
eties after their early and often brutal encounters with the peoples of the
steppes. The horse became a mainstay of farming, transport, and war for the
early equestrian empires from Egypt to Mesopotamia, Persia, South Asia,
and East Asia, and then later for the vast land empires of Alexander the
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66
Great, Rome, Persia, China, and India of the Classical Age of globalization.
The land-based empires of the Classical Age would have been impossible
but for the communications, transport, and military might of the horse.
Key Development Breakthroughs in the Fertile Crescent
The period from 3000 to 1000 BCE marked decisive civilizational advances
in the Fertile Crescent, including Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia.
Similar advances occurred in other riverine civilizations (the Indus, the
Yellow River, and the Yangtze). Breakthroughs included technological
and institutional advances in agriculture, public administration, writing
and communications, engineering, and long-distance trade. These break-
throughs gave rise to city-states and to larger political units.
The earliest kingdoms of a unified Egypt were founded around 3000 BCE,
roughly contemporaneous with the rise of the first dynasties in Meso-
potamia, beginning with the early dynasty of Sumer around 2900 BCE.
Both Egypt and Sumer had early writing systems, the hieroglyphics of
Egypt and the cuneiform (wedge-shaped) writing of the Sumerian lan-
guage, which provided an invaluable tool for public administration. Uni-
fied dynasties ruled Egypt for most of the period until the neo-Assyrian
conquest of Egypt around 670 BCE, followed by brief conquests by Babylo-
nians and afterwards by Achaemenid Persia. In Mesopotamia, a number of
dynasties rose and fell during this same period, including the first empire
of Mesopotamia, the Akkadian Empire (c. 2350–2100 BCE), followed by
Assyrian and Babylonian kingdoms. The largest of the Mesopotamian
kingdoms would be the neo-Assyrian empire (tenth to seventh century
BCE), which conquered the Levant and Egypt and which in turn was con-
quered by the Persians.
These Fertile Crescent civilizations achieved an astonishing number of
breakthroughs during this period. They created early written legal codes,
including the Code of Hammurabi (Babylonia, c. 1790 BCE), which became
models of legal codes throughout the classical world. They created grand
public structures, not least the pyramids, and considerable public infrastruc-
ture. They built cities and established methods of public administration and
tax collection. They made breakthroughs in writing systems and historical
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67
documentation. They created new philosophies and religions that would
profoundly influence Judaism and Christianity. They made great advances
in a range of scientific fields, including mathematics, astronomy, engineer-
ing, metallurgy, and medicine. And, of course, these kingdoms engaged
in long-distance trade and long-distance warfare, both dependent on the
horse. Chariots and cavalry became core features of the Near East military
from around 1500 BCE. Horses and donkeys as pack animals were vital for
long-distance trade, transporting precious stones, spices, gold, other metals,
cloth, and artisanal works.
By the end of our period, 1000 BCE, a large number of urban centers
dotted the lucky latitudes of Eurasia. A recent study of ancient cities docu-
ments twenty-six Eurasian cities with populations of ten thousand or more
between the years 800 BCE and 500 BCE, the legacy of the Equestrian Age.9
Strikingly, as we see in figure 4.6, all of these urban sites except one (Marib,
Yemen) lie in the lucky latitudes, a vivid illustration of the uniquely favor-
able development conditions in that narrow band, and almost all are either
in the temperate zones in China and the Mediterranean littoral or along
river valleys in the drylands (notably in Egypt and Mesopotamia).
Ancient Urban Centers Were Concentrated in the Lucky Latitudes
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68
Some Lessons from the Equestrian Age
The period from 3000 to 1000 BCE was transformative for the major civi-
lizations of Eurasia. Three profound technological breakthroughs were
most decisive: the domestication of the horse, the development of writing
systems, and the breakthroughs in metallurgy. These were accompanied by
dramatic advances in public administration, religion, and philosophy, espe-
cially in the Fertile Crescent. By the end of the Equestrian Age, around
1000 BCE, large land empires were beginning to emerge beyond their river-
ine home base. The first was the neo-Assyrian empire, which would briefly
conquer Mesopotamia, the Levant, eastern Anatolia, and Egypt. Yet that
empire merely set the stage for even larger empires that would arise across
the lucky latitudes of Eurasia. That is the story of the Classical Age, to
which we now turn.
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The period between 1000 BCE and 1500 CE gave rise to civilizations so dynamic that they set a standard of achievement hailed ever since as the Classical Age. Many of the world’s major religions— Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism—were forged in this period. The
great philosophies of life, as taught by Plato and Aristotle, Confucius, the
Buddha, and other sages, our greatest wisdom traditions, are from this
period. The great empires of the age—Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, India,
China, and later the Ottoman and Mongol empires—competed for glory,
beliefs, wealth, and power with an unprecedented level of ambition and
energy that continue to amaze and enthrall us today. This period is global-
ization on the grandest canvas, when the participants themselves felt that
they were writing the history of humanity.
We can call this an era of globalization by politics, since the imperial
states consciously and deliberately aimed to create global civilizations. The
empires used the apparatus of state power to disseminate ideas, spread
technologies, introduce new institutions, and build infrastructure on a
continental scale, such as the Roman roads, amphitheaters, and aqueducts
that still stand throughout Europe, North Africa, the eastern Mediter-
ranean, and western Asia. These were states that acted boldly, sometimes
recklessly, and often violently, to spread ideas and to multiply their power
and wealth.
5 The Classical Age
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70
These powers could rely on the gains in technology that had been
achieved in the past millennia: better ways to grow food, raise farm ani-
mals, transport goods, and fight wars. Perhaps their strongest technology
was something that is taken for granted today. For the first time, all four
major regions of Eurasia—the Mediterranean basin, western Asia, south-
ern Asia, and East Asia—had an alphabet or script that could be read far
and wide. For the first time in human history, thousands of books were
being written and collected. Great libraries were created, most famously at
Alexandria in the Greco-Roman period. Knowledge could now be codified
and transferred through books and formal schooling. While other parts of
the world continued to tell their histories by word of mouth and myth,
governments and independent scholars of the Classical Age empires began
to document human history in detail for perpetuity.
Yet with all of this might, knowledge, and ambition, we still find, once
again, that geography repeatedly proved decisive in shaping imperial for-
tunes. The empires we will examine lived by and large within their ecological
niches, and climate zones more than generals dictated the imperial maps.
The Axial Age
The twentieth-century German historian and philosopher Karl Jaspers
offered a crucial insight into this era with his concept of the Axial Age.1
Jaspers noted that during a span of roughly five hundred years, between
800 and 300 BCE, there was a simultaneous emergence of profound philo-
sophical and religious insights in four major civilizations of Eurasia: the
Greco-Roman world of the Mediterranean Sea, the Persian world of west-
ern Asia, the Aryan world of northern India, and the Han Chinese world
of East Asia. In all four cases, there occurred remarkable and foundational
breakthroughs in thinking about the meaning and purpose of life.
The Greco-Roman world saw the rise of Greek moral philosophy, lead-
ing to the profound intellectual breakthroughs of Plato and Aristotle and
all that followed. The Persian world gave rise to Zoroastrianism, a vision of
the universe as the battleground of good and evil, which in turn was foun-
dational for Judaism and still later for Christianity. The Indian world gave
rise to the Upanishads of Hinduism and to the teachings of Buddha about
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71
the path to nirvana (eternal happiness) through compassion for all and the
renunciation of attachment. The Chinese world gave birth to the teaching
of harmonious social order based on ritual piety, the cultivation of virtue,
and state law of Confucius and Mencius.
The philosophical and religious breakthroughs of the Axial Age influ-
enced speculative thought from then onward and continue to resonate
deeply in today’s religious beliefs and philosophical outlooks. Greek philos-
ophy was adopted by the Hellenistic empires and then the Roman Empire,
and was also incorporated into Christian theology. Confucianism remained
a core doctrine of Chinese dynasties throughout history and until today.
Buddhism is not only practiced today by 500 million people in Asia, but
its teachings of compassion, mindfulness, and the Middle Path are increas-
ingly adopted in the West as well. Even Zoroastrianism, the state religion
of the Achaemenid and Sassanid Persian empires with few adherents today,
had profound and lasting influences on the Abrahamic faiths ( Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam) through its beliefs in monotheism, the battle of
good versus evil in the universe, and the free will of individuals to choose
good or evil.
Jaspers did not argue that this simultaneous emergence of basic world
views reflected the interchange of ideas across Eurasia. He regarded this
simultaneity as a puzzle, even an accident, but one that would open a dia-
logue across civilizations in the two-and-a-half millennia that followed.
In all four worlds, the philosophical-religious breakthroughs became the
foundational elements of culture in the period after 500 BCE and eventu-
ally instruments of state power as well, as philosophical and religious ideas
became incorporated into imperial ideologies.
One wonders whether perhaps a common cause was at play. In all four
regions, by around 800 BCE, the written scripts of the respective languages
had advanced to the stage of enabling the writing of books. In ancient
Greece, for example, the tradition of passing down the ancient wisdom,
such as Homeric poetry, by bards and the spoken word was being replaced
with written manuscripts that used the Greek alphabet. The Greek alpha-
bet, the first in history with letters for vowel sounds, was invented around
800 BCE, adapting the existing Phoenician letters for the consonants and
adding letters for vowels. The remarkable outpouring of Greek texts fol-
lowed. Scripts were similarly being adopted in Persia for the Old Persian
language and in northern India for Classical Sanskrit sometime around
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72
500 BCE or later, with ongoing debates about the precise timing. In China,
the characters of Classical Chinese were similarly being developed, and
Confucian thought was written down in Classical Chinese in the period
after 500 BCE. The new scripts, in short, became the means for writing
down and transmitting the foundational texts and philosophies of Western,
Persian, Indian, and Chinese civilizations.
Thalassocracy and Tellurocracy
As the pace of economic and intellectual development hastened in the
eastern Mediterranean and western Asia around 1000 BCE, two kinds
of civilizations developed side by side. The first consisted of city-states
with economies based on sea-based trading networks, of which the most
remarkable were the Phoenicians and the ancient Greeks; the second were
the city-states based on agriculture and mining that eventually became the
land-based empires of the Classical Age. Ancient Greek offered two won-
derful words for these distinct civilizations: thalassocracy (“thalatta” meaning
sea and “cracy” for power) and tellurocracy (“tellus” for land).
The Phoenicians created perhaps the most consequential thalassocracy
in history, not only because of the Phoenician accomplishment of creating
a network of maritime trade throughout the Mediterranean region, but also
by inspiring the Greek and Roman empires that followed. Phoenicia arose
in present-day Lebanon, in the ancient coastal cities of Byblos and Tyre,
dating back to around 5000 BCE, though the peoples of Phoenicia may have
been more recent arrivals from the Red Sea or Persian Gulf region. Start-
ing around 1500 BCE, the Phoenicians began to establish coastal colonies
around the Mediterranean, eventually extending westward to the Atlantic.
The most important of these in the western Mediterranean was Carthage,
founded by the Phoenicians in the ninth century BCE. These coastal cities
constituted a remarkable network for Mediterranean-wide trade in diverse
products, including timber, glass, wine, and dyes (notably a purple dye from
sea snails that might be the root of the word Phoenicia, believed by some to
derive from the ancient Greek for blood-red).
In addition to creating a thick network of Mediterranean commerce, the
Phoenicians created a twenty-two-letter consonantal writing system for their
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73
Semitic language that in turn was adapted by the Greeks in the eighth cen-
tury BCE and later by the Romans. The Phoenician alphabet itself is assumed
to have derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The eastern Mediterranean
writing systems thus emerged from a great arc of intellectual transmission
from Egypt’s hieroglyphs to proto-writing in the Levant to the Phoenicians’
consonantal writing system and then to the decisive breakthrough of the
consonant-plus-vowel-based alphabet of the ancient Greeks.
The Phoenicians displayed legendary trading and financial skills (Plato
describes them in his Republic as “money-loving” compared with the
“wisdom-loving” Greeks) but not military dominance. Thus, the Phoeni-
cians were conquered by the rising tellurocracies of the era. Cyrus the Great
of the Achaemenid Persian Empire conquered the Levantine city-states in
539 BCE. Alexander later conquered the region in 322 BCE, and Phoenicia
was incorporated into the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires that followed
Alexander’s conquests. Carthage lived on as an independent city-state until
it, in turn, was destroyed by the Roman Empire in the Punic Wars.
The Emergence of the Classical Land-Based Empires
The emergence of land-based states that spread beyond their home river
basins to reach imperial scale dates to around 900 BCE. Ancient Egypt
was unified along the Nile River, and the successive empires of Mesopota-
mia (including the Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians) largely fought
among themselves along the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys. Then, the
Neo-Assyrian Empire (figure 5.1) gained sufficient military advantage to
conquer not only Mesopotamia but also parts of eastern Anatolia, the
Levant, and eventually Egypt (671 BCE). Despite these remarkable con-
quests, the empire collapsed very soon after, the result of civil strife, the
loss of territories to local reconquests, and finally the invasion of its capital,
Nineveh, by a combined army of Assyria’s enemies, in 612 BCE.
The stage was now set, however, for a new age of globalization, one in
which large land empires across the lucky latitudes would conquer vast ter-
ritories, engage in intensive trade and cultural exchanges with the other
empires, and wage incessant war. The Mediterranean basin and western
Asia, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indus River, became an
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The Classical Age
74
east-west battleground of contesting empires, with civilizational conflicts
that have indeed continued to the present. When the United States goads
and provokes Iran today, it does so—mostly unaware, to be sure—in a way
that mirrors ancient conflicts and prejudices between the western Mediter-
ranean and Persia that date back 2,500 years.
The first great Persian empire, the Achaemenid Empire, was founded by
Cyrus the Great around 559 BCE. The Achaemenid Empire swept away the
remnants of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian state, and other powers
of Mesopotamia, and went on to conquer Anatolia, the Phoenicians, and
Egypt. It was Cyrus who in 539 BCE allowed the Jews to be exiled by Babylonia
after the Babylonian conquest of Judea (597 BCE) to return to Jerusalem.
According to some scholars, Cyrus also supported the priestly compilation
of the Jewish historical and sacred texts that became the Jewish Torah.
The remarkable expansion of the Achaemenid Empire brought Persia
to the doorstep of the Greek city-states, setting up the most famous and
arguably most decisive east-west clash in history, the war between Persia
and Athens. Persia attacked mainland Greece in 490 BCE, yielding three
historic results. First, the Athenian victory, which repulsed Persia and led
The Neo-Assyrian Empire, 671 BCE
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75
to Persia’s ultimate defeat in the Persian-Greek Wars in 449 BCE, marked a
decisive victory for the Western civilizations over invasions from the East.
Second, the victory of Athens at Marathon, of course, gave us the epony-
mous twenty-six-mile race. Third, the Persian-Greek Wars marked the
invention in the West of the field of historical writing, with Herodotus’s
magnificent and pathbreaking Histories.
There was no rest for the weary in the wake of the Persian-Greek Wars.
Just years after the end of those long wars, Athens and Sparta entered into the
Peloponnesian Wars, 431–404 BCE, which led to the downfall of the Athenian
Republic. Aside from giving us the second great book of Western history,
Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars, the defeat of Athens ended decades of Athe-
nian preeminence that would forever after be remembered as the Golden
Age of Athens, a period of efflorescence of democratic institutions, scholar-
ship, the arts, and civil participation that has inspired the West ever since.
Yet Athens’s decisive role in Western history was far from over, for it
was the next century that gave us Plato, Aristotle, and the very foundations
of Western philosophy. Socrates’ death sentence was carried out in 399 BCE,
and his greatest student and follower, Plato, opened his famed Academy
in 387 BCE. There Plato put forward many of the core concepts of Western
ethics, including the commitment to reason over the passions, the goal of
self-knowledge, the pursuit of virtue, the objective of leading a good life,
and the notion of politics as the search for the common good, that would
be enshrined in Western thought. These ideas were further advanced, and
modified, by Plato’s greatest student and arguably the greatest thinker in
Western history, Aristotle. Aristotle went on to start his own school, the
Lyceum, rightly considered to be the world’s first university, in 335 BCE.
Unlike his teacher Plato, Aristotle was committed not only to philosophi-
cal contemplation but also to empirical research. Aristotle’s direct study of
life forms and ecology marked the birth of the science of biology. Aristotle
is also credited with founding many other scientific disciplines, including
logic, rhetoric, aesthetics, politics, ethics, and more.
Aristotle is remembered also for his most famous student. In 343 BCE,
Aristotle was summoned by Philip of Macedon to tutor his young son Alex-
ander, a task that Aristotle pursued for several years. Alexander became king
of Macedonia and, in 334 BCE, embarked on his wars against Persia to the
east, a retribution for the Achaemenid invasion of Greece a century-and-a-
half earlier. In 332 BCE, Alexander captured Egypt, then a satrapy of Persia.
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76
He conquered the Persian Empire in 330 BCE with the capture of Persepolis,
the capital, and continued his conquests to the east to the Indus River. On
his march back toward Macedonia, Alexander died suddenly in Babylonia,
of unknown causes, at the age of thirty-three in 323 BCE.
The maximum extent of Alexander’s conquests is shown in figure 5.2. We
see clearly the decisive east-west axis of Alexander’s empire, following the now
familiar east-west axis of climate zones and technological diffusion. Alexander
conquered the regions to the east of Macedonia where his horse-drawn army
could carry him. The Hellenistic empires that followed Alexander’s death also
remained within the ecological zones that could be governed by the Greeks—
temperate zones and dryland alluvial regions characterized by mixed-crop and
animal-husbandry agriculture, horse breeding, and the familiar range of infec-
tious diseases—never venturing southward into the tropics. It was not until
more than two thousand years later that European conquerors would discover
how to survive in malarial regions of tropical Africa.
The Unmatched Legacy of the Greeks
When Alexander died suddenly, his generals and followers launched into
a complex series of wars of succession. Parts of the empire were seized by
Empire of Alexander the Great, 323 BCE
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77
followers, thereby creating several Hellenistic successor states. The most
important of these were the Seleucid Empire, including Anatolia, the
Levant, Mesopotamia, and Persia (essentially the Hellenistic successor of
the Achaemenid Empire defeated by Alexander); the Ptolemaic King-
dom of Egypt; and, after a few decades of strife, the Antigonid Empire of
Macedonia. Other Hellenistic kingdoms included Pergamum, the Greco-
Bactrian Kingdom, and the Indo-Greek Kingdom, among others.
The result was centuries more of Greek colonization, trade, culture, and
philosophy throughout the lands that Alexander had conquered. Greek
wisdom continued to guide, train, and inspire a vast region from the east-
ern Mediterranean to the Indus River. Politics and trade were conducted in
Greek as a lingua franca, and Greek texts circulated throughout this vast
area. This influence would persist even after Greece itself was conquered by
the Romans in 146 BCE, and even after the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt
finally succumbed to Rome in the epic battle of Actium, between Augustus
and the combined forces of Cleopatra and Marc Anthony, in 31 BCE.
Greek culture was propagated by the establishment of gymnasia (schools
for young men) that were designed to promote character, athletic ability,
and fealty to Greek cultural ideas. The Greek concept of paideia, the edu-
cation of youth to build the excellence of character needed for virtuous
citizenship and the good life (eudaimonia), as described by Aristotle in the
Nichomachean Ethics, was promoted throughout the Hellenistic empires.
This ideal of the educational program has remained a formative concept
throughout Western society up to the present.
The Roman Empire itself, which completed its conquest of Greece in
146 BCE, remained heavily dependent on Greek science, philosophy, and
religion. The Eastern Roman Empire remained largely Greek speaking,
and Roman elites were often bilingual in Greek and Latin. For a long
period, Athens remained a preeminent center of learning, and the great
libraries of the Roman Empire, notably in Alexandria and in Pergamum,
avidly collected and protected Greek texts and learning. The Roman
emperor Trajan’s library in Rome had both Latin and Greek sections.
Greek learning became part of both Jewish and Christian thought
through the reception of Greek philosophical ideas into religious thought
by Jewish theologians such as Philo of Alexandria and early Christian
theologians such as Origen, also of Alexandria. When Diocletian divided
the Roman Empire into Western and Eastern parts, the Eastern Roman
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78
Empire conducted its affairs in Greek, further reinforcing the fundamental
role of Greek ideas in Roman rule. When the Western Roman Empire
was conquered by Germanic tribes, the Greek learning largely disappeared
from public institutions in the West but was kept alive, at least faintly, in
the Christian monasteries.
In the east, with the rise of Islam in the seventh century, ancient Greek
learning was given yet another great historical impetus by the Arab caliphs
and generations of Islamic philosophers, who methodically studied and
translated the ancient Greek volumes into Arabic, a principal route by
which the Greek treasures have survived to the present. The Abbasid
caliph Abdullah ibn Muhammad al-Mansur moved the capital of the
caliphate from Damascus to a new City of Peace (Madinat-al-Salam),
today’s Baghdad. He attracted scholars to the new city and embarked on
a huge mission of translating ancient texts. Throughout the Islamic world,
great philosophers, including Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and later Ibn Rushd
(Averroes), followed in the path of Philo and Origen by incorporating
Aristotelian science and ethics into Islamic thinking and wisdom.
Mansur’s grandson and successor as caliph established the Bayt-al-
Hikmah (House of Wisdom) as Baghdad’s great library and repository
of ancient and current knowledge. Fortuitously, a great invention arrived
in Baghdad at the same time: papermaking, a Chinese innovation. As
described by Violet Moller, the art of making paper from fibrous plants was
transferred to the Arab world by two Chinese soldiers captured in battle,
leading to the first paper mill in the Muslim world in Samarkand in 751,
with the know-how arriving in Baghdad some forty years later.2
Ancient Greek wisdom ultimately came full circle, returning to Rome
and the West more generally in the Western Middle Ages. Arabic transla-
tions of the ancient Greek and Islamic commentaries on the Greek phi-
losophers were translated into Latin and studied by church theologians in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, most importantly by Thomas Aquinas
(1225–1274), whose Summa Theologica is a profound meditation on faith and
reason using the tools and philosophy of Aristotle combined with Chris-
tian theology. Aristotelian philosophy was embraced as the curriculum
for Europe’s new universities, in Paris (where Aquinas taught), Bologna,
Padua, Salamanca, and elsewhere. The Italian Renaissance added a secular
impetus with the new Renaissance passion for the ancient world. Another
important event gave a further push. When the Ottomans captured
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79
Constantinople in 1453, Greek scholars in Constantinople fled for their
lives and brought their classical knowledge and texts to new positions
within the European universities.
The Roman Empire
But let us return to the drama of imperial competition in the Classical
Age. The Roman Empire, which defeated Macedonia during several wars
between 214 and 148 BCE and then went on to conquer the other Hellenistic
states (including the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt in 32 BCE), lies along the
familiar east-west axis of the lucky latitudes. In figure 5.3, we see that the
Roman Empire’s maximum extent as of 117 CE under Emperor Trajan closely
tracks the Köppen-Geiger Mediterranean climate zone (Cw). The extent of
the Roman Empire, like those before it, was largely defined by climate.
It is clear why the Roman emperors stopped at the coastal edge of
North Africa. To go further south meant to hit the desert, with its inhospi-
table and largely uneconomic environment. And to go north of the impe-
rial boundaries, across the Rhine into present-day Germany, meant to
enter a difficult region characterized by thick forests, heavy soils, and cold
The Roman Empire, 117 CE
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80
winters. In his study Germania, written around 98 CE, the Roman historian
Tacitus observed: “Moreover, quite apart from the danger of a rough and
unknown sea, who would abandon Asia or Africa or Italy and seek out
Germania, with its unlovely landscape and harsh climate, dreary to inhabit
and behold, if it were not one’s native land?”
The Han Empire
Let us now turn our attention to the eastern edge of Eurasia in the same
period as the rise of the Roman Empire. In China, the emperor Qin Shi
Huang, famed for his burial in Xi’an with his terracotta army of warriors,
horses, and chariots, first united China in 221 BCE. In explaining Qin’s mili-
tary success in unifying China, historian L. Carrington Goodrich notes:
“The combination of excellent preparation, constant pressure, and superb
mastery of the newest arts of war, especially cavalry, proved too much for
his enemies.”3 Fighting on horseback, which had arrived from the western
steppes, and many other technologies, including the ox-drawn plow (from
the Near East), glassware (from the Mediterranean), and astronomical
ideas (from South Asia), flowed into ancient China from the West, spur-
ring China’s own great capacity for technological innovation.
Although the Qin Dynasty lasted only from 221 until 206 BCE, it was
followed by the Han Dynasty, which lasted for four hundred years, from
206 BCE to 220 CE. The Han Dynasty established boundaries of China that
remain the core of the Chinese state today. To understand those boundar-
ies, examine the climate zones of China and its neighbors. Modern-day
China is characterized by a warm temperate climate in the east and south
of the country, a cold temperate climate in the northeast, a dry steppe
region along the northern boundary with Mongolia, the Himalayan pla-
teau in the southwest, and a southern boundary along the tropical zone
of China’s Southeast Asian neighbors, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam. The
Han Dynasty, shown at the peak of its area in 73 CE (figure 5.4), included
the temperate zones of modern-day China plus a buffer zone of steppe
separating the Han Empire from the steppe region of China’s northern
neighbor, the Xiognu Khanate (today’s Mongolia). Then, as now, the trop-
ics to the south were not part of the Han Empire.
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81
The Han imperial extent, in other words, was the temperate region of
continent East Asia plus a strip of steppe in the north that served as a
buffer with the vast northern steppes. The population was centered on the
two largest river basins, the Yellow River running west to east through the
steppe region in the north and the Yangtze running west to east through
the temperate zone in the south. The Yellow River farm system was based
on wheat and millet in the cool and dry climate, while the Yangtze basin
farmers mainly grew rice.
The Han fought vigorously to extend its rule into Vietnam and directly
ruled Vietnam for repeated stretches, but each time, Han rule was reversed
by local rebellions. At other times, the rule was indirect, with Vietnamese
kingdoms paying tribute to the Chinese empire. While China’s cultural
influences on Vietnam were deep, China never succeeded in incorporating
its southern tropical neighbors. The climate barrier ultimately set the limit
of imperial expansion. The scholar Pita Kelekna, writing of the role of the
horse in history, puts it this way: “The horse, evolved in semiarid climes, was
definitely unsuited to dense rain forests and jungle warfare. The Chinese
repeatedly attempted expansion southward, but as we have seen, even the
Mongol Yuan could not consolidate conquest in tropical Southeast Asia.”4
While China had received a flow of crucial technologies from the west
in the first millennium BCE, the Han Dynasty is noted for a remarkable
The Han Dynasty, 73 CE
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82
flowering of homegrown technologies. A partial list of spectacular break-
throughs during the Han Empire includes papermaking, navigation (the
rudder), mathematics (negative numbers, solution of equations), flood con-
trol (along the Yellow River), the waterwheel, metallurgy (wrought iron),
and the seismometer. The empire also invented a model of administration
that would last throughout China’s history: a centralized national govern-
ment ruling over a hierarchy of provinces, counties, districts, and villages.
Confucianism was codified as the state ideology.
With its internal peace, the high productivity of mixed-grain and
animal-husbandry farm systems, and an era of rapid technological break-
throughs, the population of the Han Empire around 1 CE reached an esti-
mated 60 million people, and the population of the Roman Empire at the
time reached around 45 million. The Han and Roman empires together
accounted for roughly one-half of the world’s population.
The Developed World as of 100 CE
The Eurasian world in 100 CE (figure 5.5) was comprised of three major
empires along the west-east axis of the lucky latitudes: the Roman Empire
in the Mediterranean basin; the Parthian Empire of western Asia (today’s
Major Eurasian Empires as of 100 CE
Roman EmpireRoman Empire
Parthian EmpireParthian Empire Han EmpireHan Empire
Armenia Kushan
Xiongnu
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83
Iraq and Iran), and the Han Empire of China. After the collapse of the vast
Mauryan Empire of India in 187 BCE, the Indian subcontinent was divided
among a number of ruling states, including the Kushan, Indo-Scythians,
Indo-Greeks, and others. To the north of the three great empires lay the
heavily forested regions of northern Europe, the west Eurasian steppes north
of Parthia, and the east Eurasian steppes north of China. To the south lay the
deserts of North Africa and Arabia and the tropical lands of Southeast Asia.
As of 100 CE, the Roman and Han empires each had a population of
around 60 million, and the Indian subcontinent had roughly the same or
perhaps slightly more. The population of Parthia might be guessed at around
15 million. Combined, these regions were home to perhaps 200 million of
the estimated 225 million world population. The populations of sub-Saharan
Africa and the Americas were tiny, a few million each, as were the popula-
tions of the Eurasian steppes, deserts, and tropical regions. The vast pro-
ductivity of the mixed-grain and animal-husbandry systems of temperate
Eurasia, supported by horse-based trade and governance and the flow of
technological advances across a vast east-west axis, meant that the lucky lati-
tudes really were the center of world population, economy, and technology.
It is important to remember that the lucky latitudes contain two major
climate zones: the temperate zones of Western Europe and China, at the
western and eastern ends of Eurasia, and the vast stretch of semiarid and
desert regions that lie in between in West and Central Asia. The Roman
Empire and the Han Empire were each temperate-zone empires with high
population densities fed by highly fertile grain production (mostly wheat in
the Roman Empire and wheat, millet, and rice in the Han Empire), while the
Persian Empire and others of West and Central Asia were far more sparsely
populated, living on grains, fruits, and vineyards in the irrigated river valleys
and the vast grasslands that fed their horses and maintained their cavalries.
The data in table 5.1 are therefore insightful. I use the estimates of the
HYDE project on historical demography to estimate the population distri-
bution across climate zones of several major empires: Alexander’s empire,
the first-century Roman Empire, the first-century Han Empire, and four
empires that I discuss below: the eighth-century Umayyad Empire (the
first Arab-Islamic empire) and the fifteenth-century Ottoman, Mon-
gol, and Timurid empires. We see that the West Asian and Central Asian
empires of Alexander, the Arabs, and Timur were largely dryland empires,
while the Roman and Han empires were mainly temperate-zone empires.
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84
The Ottoman Empire, successor to the Eastern Roman Empire, was a mix—
temperate in Anatolia and the Balkans, dryland in western Asia. Ultimately,
the larger populations and higher population densities of the Roman and
Han empires gave them enormous advantages in scale and technological
achievements but did not protect them from conquest by more sparsely set-
tled neighbors—the Germanic tribes of northern Europe, the Turkish con-
querors of the eastern Mediterranean, and the nomadic tribes of the Central
Asian drylands that would raid and conquer China.
Global Trade Within the Lucky Latitudes
The three great empires and the northern kingdoms of the Indian sub-
continent engaged in a long-distance exchange of technologies, manufac-
tured goods, and ideas. The steppe regions provided the highways along
the so-called Silk Road that connected Rome in the west with the Han
Empire in the east (figure 5.6). Silks from China flowed into Rome, while
glassware from the Mediterranean glassworks flowed into China. The Silk
Road carried official embassies, such as one from Roman emperor Marcus
Aurelius (r. 161–180 CE) to the Han emperor, as well as philosophers and
teachers. The first mention of Buddhism in China, arriving from its home
in northern India, occurred in 65 CE.
Table
A – – – – 0.46 – –
B 50.7 17.1 17.6 54.3 22.3 37.0 60.0
C 26.4 77.2 67.4 25.3 51.2 48.7 8.7
D – 0.33 12.1 – 18.3 1.5 0.06
H 22.9 5.3 2.8 20.5 7.8 12.9 31.3
Source: Author’s calculations using HYDE data. See data appendix for details.
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85
The Fall of Rome and the Rise of Islam
Despite Rome’s dominance of technology and population, the political
stability of the Roman Empire waned over time. In 285 CE, the Roman
emperor Diocletian divided the rule of the vast empire between the East-
ern Roman Empire ruled from Byzantium, later Constantinople, and the
Western Roman Empire ruled from Rome. While the governance of the
Roman Empire would go through further cycles of unity and east-west
division, Diocletian’s decision was never permanently reversed. The West-
ern Roman Empire succumbed to conquest by Germanic tribes from
the north, with the final fall of Rome in 476 CE. Meanwhile the Eastern
Roman Empire lived on as the Byzantine Empire and still governed most
of the Mediterranean basin from Constantinople. The extent of the Byzan-
tine Empire in 555 CE is shown in figure 5.7.
For centuries after, the temperate lands faced a constant menace from
the horseback warriors arriving from the Eurasian steppes. The Huns made
devastating raids from the Black Sea region into Eastern and Western
The Silk Road, First Century CE
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86
Europe in the middle of the fifth century. The Goths, Avars, Magyars, Bul-
gars, and Xiognu, all originating in the steppes of Central Asia, attacked
the temperate-zone civilizations to their south and are remembered for
their ferocity and destruction. The military victories of these peoples over
vastly more numerous populations is testimony both to the persisting
advantage of cavalry in that era and to the decisive edge that military tech-
nology can offer to smaller states that are outnumbered and outclassed in
other technologies. The even greater land victories of the Mongols, another
conqueror from the steppes, would occur a few centuries later.
The great upheavals of the Mediterranean region following the fall of
Rome, along with the weakening of the Persian (Sassanid) Empire in the
seventh century, opened the way for yet another lightning conquest, this
time by Arabs on horseback and camel who emerged from the Arabian
desert with a new religion. Islam, and a succession of vast Islamic empires,
arose rapidly and at a massive scale. Once again, the geographic logic fol-
lowed the east-west ecological gradient, this time spreading across the des-
erts of Arabia into the drylands of North Africa and Spain to the west
and into the drylands of West and Central Asia to the east. The Byzantine
Empire was quickly shorn of its holdings in North Africa and the Levant.
The Byzantine Empire, 555 CE
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87
Within one century, the Islamic realm extended from the Atlantic coast
of Iberia across North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Levant into
Persia and beyond to the Indus River. The Umayyad Dynasty was founded
in 661 CE by the third caliph, with the capital in Damascus. The Umayyad
Caliphate was in turn overthrown by the Abbasid Caliphate in 750 CE.
The Arabs failed in their attempt to extend their direct conquests into
the temperate regions of Western Europe. The invading Islamic army was
defeated by the Franks in the Battle of Tours (732 CE) in today’s France,
thereby limiting Islam’s conquest in Western Europe to the Iberian Pen-
insula. In the eastern Mediterranean, the Arab armies battled the Eastern
Roman Empire (Byzantium) over several centuries. By and large, the Byz-
antine Empire was able to repulse the Arab invaders from Anatolia and
the Balkans region but lost several islands in the eastern Mediterranean,
including Crete, Malta, and Sicily (figure 5.8). Islam, however, extended
far beyond the conquests by the Arabs. Arab merchants and seafarers
brought Islam to Indian Ocean settlements as early as the late seventh cen-
tury. Islam subsequently took hold in parts of India, China, and Southeast
Asia along major trade routes. Sufi missionaries created syncretic religious
The Umayyad Empire, 700 CE
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88
practices with local animist communities. And in the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries, rulers in the Indonesia archipelago and Malay peninsula
converted to Islam to bolster their political authority.
Roughly four centuries after the rise of the Arab caliphates, the Arab-
led empires were themselves confronted with a new and vigorous rival:
Turkish tribes that emerged from Central Asia (present-day Turkmenistan
and Kazakhstan) and entered the lands of western Asia via Persia. These
Turkish tribes, beginning with the Seljuks, were heavily influenced by Per-
sian society and converted to Islam around 1000 CE. The Seljuks defeated
the Persian Empire and then advanced into Anatolia, wresting Anatolia
from the Byzantine Empire step by step, with a key victory in 1071. The
arrival of the Seljuks in western Asia and the Levant was the trigger for
the First Crusade in 1095, called by Pope Urban II, which in turn launched
centuries of competition in the Levant and Balkans between the Christian
kingdoms of Europe and Byzantium on one side and the Muslim-Turkish
empires of western Asia on the other.
The Seljuks, in turn, were displaced by another Turkish empire, the
Ottomans, who eventually conquered the Arab lands of North Africa, the
Byzantine capital at Constantinople in 1453, and the Byzantine lands of
the Balkans and parts of Central Europe, including Budapest, but were
stopped at the gates of Vienna. As we can see by comparing figures 5.7
and 5.9, the Ottomans governed most of the lands of the Byzantine
(Eastern Roman) Empire at its maximum extent in 555 CE under Emperor
Justinian, with the exceptions of the Italian peninsula and the westernmost
regions of Morocco and Spain. Both the Byzantine and Ottoman empires
were empires of the Mediterranean basin—the lands of wheat, olive groves,
and vineyards—and the desert margins.
The Remarkable Song Dynasty of China
During the same years as the rise of the Seljuks and Ottomans, China was
experiencing another golden age, the Song Dynasty, which is dated from
960 to 1279 (figure 5.10). On the eastern border of temperate Eurasia, a
newly unified and peaceful China entered a period of stunning techno-
logical innovation, population growth, and economic prosperity. China’s
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The Ottoman Empire, 1566 CE
The Song Dynasty, 1200 CE
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90
remarkable successes in technologies (such as the compass and gunpowder)
and in governance (such as the issuance of paper currency) would even-
tually travel west and empower Western Europe in its global ascent after
1400. Yet for several centuries, China was far in the lead in technological
innovations and peaceful governance.
At the base of the Song triumphs was the excellence of governance.
The Song Dynasty has been termed “The Age of Confucian Rule.” Dieter
Kuhn explains:
Between 960 and 1022, the early emperors of the Song and their coun-
cilors set high standards of government practice, intellectual activity, and
personal conduct that would serve as a model for their successors. . . .
Under the leadership of these three men [the first three Song rulers]—
all lovers of learning—Song China came closer to the ideal of Confu-
cian rule than any other dynasty in Chinese history. . . . Confucianism
rooted in the classics offered an ethic based on humanness, righteous-
ness, appropriateness, filial piety, loyalty, the civil principle over the mili-
tary, and the performance of rites.5
The Song Dynasty might justly be considered the world’s first large-
scale capitalist economy: land was privately owned, merchant families
invested in joint-stock companies, international trade was open, harbors
were improved, and Chinese ocean-based trade expanded throughout the
Indian Ocean to East Africa and the Red Sea. A navy established in the
twelfth century policed the seas. Agricultural productivity rose, supporting
a doubling of the Song population, to an astounding peak of around 120
million, and a massive increase of the urban population. The cities of Kai-
feng and Hangzhou hosted populations of more than 1 million each. China
still faced violence from its northern neighbors, and the Song Dynasty
ceded the North China plains, including the Yellow River basin, to the
Jurchen horsemen from Manchuria in 1142. The Jin Dynasty, as the Jurch-
ens called their kingdom, would in turn be conquered by the Mongols a
century later.
The technological innovations of the Song era, propelled by urbaniza-
tion, peace, prosperity, and market forces, were astounding—one of the
greatest technological flowerings of human history. The Song age brought
major advances in navigation, including the nautical compass, the rudder,
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91
improved shipbuilding, and other maritime technologies; gunpowder and
artillery; the moveable-type printing press, roughly two centuries before
Gutenberg; structural engineering; metallurgy; artisanal ware, includ-
ing fine porcelain and silk textiles; mechanical clocks; paper currency;
and institutions of banking, insurance, and joint-stock enterprises. These
advances gradually found their way west along the steppes and lucky lati-
tudes to Venice and on to Western Europe.
The Last Hurrahs of the Steppe Conquerors
For more than three thousand years, semi-nomadic horsemen from the
steppes settled, invaded, battled, dominated, and retreated from the tem-
perate lands to the south. Regularly outnumbered, they won their victo-
ries through superior horsemanship, cavalry charges, careful planning, and
valor. Their names—Huns, Alans, Goths, Turks, and Mongols—still inspire
fear in Europe. Yet it was during a time of apparent peace and prosperity in
the lucky latitudes, during the High Middle Ages in Europe and the Song
Dynasty in China, in the thirteenth century, that the final burst of horse-
power arrived from the steppes with the Mongols.
Genghis Khan was a Mongol warlord who defeated rival Mongol lead-
ers and declared himself king of all the Mongols in 1206. From that point,
he and his successors led the Mongol armies of tens of thousands of horse-
men into conquests of China, Central Asia, Russia, the Caucasus, West
Asia, and Eastern Europe. When Genghis Khan died in 1227, the empire
already extended from the Pacific to the Caspian Sea. He was succeeded
by his son Ogedei, who continued to expand the empire until his death in
1241. The Mongols had expanded into China, the Caucuses, and Central
Asia and were invading Poland and Hungry when word of Ogedei’s death
reached the troops. This stopped the imminent invasion of Europe as the
princes returned for the funeral and to elect the next Khan.
One intriguing hypothesis as to the extraordinary burst of Mongol mili-
tary might is a climate period especially suited to livestock. According to a
study of tree rings from Central Mongolia over a period of 1,112 years, my
Columbia University colleague Neil Pederson and his associates found that
the period 1206–27 was “warm and persistently wet.” In particular, there
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92
were fifteen consecutive years of above-average moisture that was “unprec-
edented over the last 1,112 years.” They propose that “these climate condi-
tions promoted high grassland productivity and favored the formation of
Mongol political and military power.” In essence, exceptionally good rains
led to good grasses, which fueled the horsepower to conquer Eurasia.6
By 1259, the Mongol Empire had reached the astounding extent shown
in figure 5.11, making it the largest contiguous land empire in history.
China, the Kievan Rus (the forerunner of Russia), Central Asia, the Cau-
casus, Persia, and parts of the Balkans and Eastern Europe were under
Mongolian rule. Eurasia was at the mercy and control of the Mongols, a
result of stunning military organization based on a superior cavalry and
their remarkable exploits, including the capacity to cover vast distances in
difficult terrain. A postal system united the vast empire, with riders cover-
ing up to two hundred kilometers per day.
The conquests were extraordinarily bloody, with millions killed. It was
also by way of the Mongolian trading network that the Black Death reached
Sicily from the Black Sea in 1347, eventually killing up to a quarter of the
European population. Yet the Pax Mongolica that extended over the vast
part of Eurasia also ushered in a massive expansion of east-west trade that
The Mongol Empire at its Maximum Extent, 1259 CE
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93
connected Western Europe and East Asia. Merchants were protected, and
trade flourished. It was on the Mongol Silk Road that Marco Polo took his
famed journey to Khanbaliq (today’s Beijing), Kublai Khan’s capital in China.
The Mongol Empire began to unravel in the fourteenth century from
internal dissension, disintegrating into a number of separate khanates. Those,
in turn, soon collapsed. China was recaptured by Han rulers in 1378, ending
a century of Mongol rule and ushering in the Ming Dynasty. Other Mongol
khanates lasted longer, but generally were overtaken by local powers.
The Mongol Empire was not, in fact, the last attempt to create an all-
encompassing Muslim land empire across Eurasia. The final remarkable
attempt was due to an ethnic Turk, born near Samarkand (modern-day
Uzbekistan), who took his inspiration from Genghis Khan. Timur, known to
the West as Tamerlane (Timur the Lame) because of injuries he had incurred
as a youth, was born circa 1330, roughly 170 years after Genghis Khan.
While Timur was not a direct descendant of Genghis, and was ethnically
Turco-Mongol rather than Mongol, he claimed a common ancestor with
Genghis and depicted his conquests as serving to restore the rightful rule
of the Mongols. He also declared his conquests to be in the name of Islam.
Timur spent thirty-five years in wars and expeditions, attempting to
restore the Mongol Empire and indeed to conquer the known world. At its
maximum extent, shown in figure 5.12, the Timurid Empire had swallowed
The Timurid Empire, 1400 AD
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94
Persia, the trans-Caucasus (present-day Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan),
and much of Central Asia (present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan), but it was
held in check in the Levant, Russia, and China. The empire was contained
almost entirely within the BS (desert) and BW (steppe) climate zones, with
little success in extending beyond the dryland regions. Timur’s empire col-
lapsed soon after his death in 1405, and with that collapse ended the empires
of the steppe warriors of Central Asia. The steppe regions would in turn be
conquered by others, notably Persia and Russia, in coming centuries.
Some Lessons from the Classical Age
It is easy to be awed by the Classical Age, with its breathtaking scale,
dramas, and achievements. Here was civilization-making on a grand scale.
Four great civilizations—Greco-Roman, Persian, Islamic, and Chinese—
vied for power, while also engaging in long-distance trade and a continu-
ous interchange of ideas and technologies across Eurasia. Of course, these
achievements did not include the entire world; I have left out the stories
of Africa, the Americas, and Oceania during this era. Yet it is also starkly
true that Eurasia was home to 85 percent of humanity from 1000 BCE to
1 CE and 77 percent in 1500 CE.7 And within Eurasia, the lucky latitudes
were home to 67 percent of the Eurasian population in 1000 BCE and
57 percent in 1500 CE. As I’ve repeatedly emphasized, much of world
economic history and technological advances were concentrated in the
Eurasian lucky latitudes.
Two thousand years ago, the potential for multinational governance at
a vast scale was already achieved. The European Union, one can say, seeks
to govern Europe at the scale of the Pax Romana, but without the imperial
wars and without the chauvinism of one people dominating the rest. The
People’s Republic of China similarly aims for the internal peace of the Han
Dynasty and the remarkable innovative spirit of the Song Dynasty. Today’s
Islamic world is fragmented, yet the Golden Age of Islam under the Abba-
sid Caliphate of Baghdad reminds us of the era when Islamic scholars led
the world in knowledge and sought ancient wisdom from all sources in order
to create an integrated knowledge and science. That noble effort saved much
of the Classical heritage for later generations, including our own.
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As of 1500, we arrive at a pivotal moment in human history, when the Old World and the New World were suddenly reunited through ocean-going vessels, and when Europeans first sailed to Asia by circling the Cape of Good Hope at the Southern tip of Africa. For the first time in more
than ten thousand years, ever since the land bridge Beringia between Asia and
Europe was submerged at the beginning of the Holocene, there resumed an
active interchange between the Old World and the Americas. Two voyages of
the 1490s—those of Christopher Columbus from the Atlantic coast of Spain
to the Caribbean in 1492 and of Vasco de Gama from Lisbon to Calicut, India,
in 1498 and back in 1499—decisively changed the direction of world history.
Humanity’s understanding of the world and our place in it, the organization of
the global economy, the centers of global power, and the decisive technologies of
society were all upended by the new era of ocean-based globalization. Yet before
we can appreciate the vast implications of these two voyages and their after-
math, we should first address a more basic question: Why did Western Europe
rather than East Asia come to dominate the seas, and thereby the world?
The Great Chinese Reversal
In the early fifteenth century, China’s navigational capacity was second to
none in the world. The famed seven voyages of Admiral Zheng He during
6 The Ocean Age
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96
the early Ming Dynasty, in the first three decades of the fifteenth century,
are justly remembered hundreds of years later as remarkable naval accom-
plishments of China.1 These voyages of enormous fleets sailed from China
to Southeast Asia, through the South China Sea and the Malacca Pass,
around Java and Sumatra, into the Indian Ocean, and all the way to East
Africa, Arabia, the coasts of India, and back to China. The route of the
fourth voyage, 1413–15, is shown in figure 6.1.
These great voyages were a triumph of naval technology, a remarkable
demonstration of China’s grandeur, and an act of Chinese statecraft. The
first voyage is described as consisting of a fleet of 317 ships with twenty-
eight thousand crewmen; the other six voyages were of similar scale. One
of the key goals of the Ming emperor was to ensure that all the countries
of the Indian Ocean understood clearly the geopolitical ordering of the
time. China was the undoubted Middle Kingdom, the one to which all
other kingdoms should pay tribute and obeisance. The voyages aimed to
establish a system of tributary trade. The visit by the Chinese fleet was to
be followed by return visits by representatives of the respective kingdoms
to China. In those latter visits, these states would pay tribute to the Mid-
dle Kingdom and in return receive reciprocal gifts from China. At the
same time, private commercial trade independent of the tributary trade
Zheng He’s Fourth Voyage, 1413–1415
TIBETTIBET
INDIA
CEYLON (SRI LANKA)
ARABIA
AFRICA
SUMATRA
JAVA
BORNEO
Taiwan Cham
pa
(Vietnam )
Samudra
Arabian Sea
Red Sea
South China
Sea
PACIFIC OCEAN
INDIAN OCEAN
Hormuz
Dhofar
Aden
Mecca Jiddah
Palembang
Calicut (Kozhikode Cochin (Kochi)
Calicut (Kozhikode Cochin (Kochi)
MalaccaMalacca
Majapahit
Samudra
Palembang
Majapahit
CH IN
A
Zeila (Seylac)
Mogadishu Brava
(Baraawe) Malindi
to Mozambique M
alabar Coast
Persian Gulf
Persian Gulf
Main fleet Secondary fleet
0 500 1000 mi
0 800 1600 km
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97
was highly restricted. Indeed, in 1371, the Ming emperor had prohibited
purely private trade.
Zheng He’s patron and sponsor was the Yongle emperor (r. 1402–24).
Upon the emperor’s death, his son discontinued the voyages on the grounds
that they were unnecessary, expensive, and a violation of Confucian prin-
ciples. The son died in 1425, and his successor, the Yongle emperor’s grand-
son, ordered Zheng He in 1430 to undertake a seventh voyage. Zheng He
apparently died at sea in 1433 or perhaps soon after the completion of the
seventh voyage.
At that point, Chinese history took a more decisive anti-trade turn,
one whose repercussions are still felt today. At a hinge moment of his-
tory, with China dominating the seas, and its naval power and abili-
ties far surpassing anything known by Europeans, the Ming Dynasty
largely abandoned the high seas, called off further voyages, and drasti-
cally reduced its fleet. Port facilities were scaled back, and the coastal
population declined, signaling a decline in overall commercial maritime
activity. While historians still debate the extent to which international
commercial trade was ended, China surely downplayed the impor-
tance of the oceans in its future statecraft. One common argument is
that the continuing threat of steppe warriors on the northern border
led China to look northward rather than oceanward. Another argument
is that Confucian bureaucrats of the Ming Dynasty looked askance at
commercial activity.
The ramifications were profound. China largely abandoned the compe-
tition for the Indian Ocean at just the moment that two small kingdoms
on the Atlantic coast, Portugal and Spain, began to increase their interest
in oceangoing navigation and trade. Instead of China circling the Cape
of Good Hope en route to Europe, it was European powers that circled
the Cape of Good Hope en route to Asia. And within a century of 1433, it
was the gunboats of Spain, Portugal, and other European powers that were
plying the waters of the Indian Ocean and circumnavigating the Earth.
China gradually ceded its technological leadership and fell behind Europe
in the sciences, engineering, and mathematics. By the nineteenth century,
the gap in technological capacity was so large that China’s sovereignty was
compromised not by its northern neighbors as in the past, but by North
Atlantic European nations that were far less populous than China and
halfway around the world.
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98
Writing in 1776, 340 years after the last voyage, Adam Smith described
China in this way:
China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile,
best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in world.
It seems, however, to have been long stationary. Marco Polo, who visited
it more than five hundred years ago, describes its cultivation, industry,
and populousness, almost in the same terms in which they are described
by travellers in the present times. It had perhaps, even long before his
time, acquired that full complement of riches which the nature of its
laws and institutions permits it to acquire.2
That China was “stationary” for this long period was likely due in part to
its having abandoned the gains in technological and scientific knowledge
that would have accompanied more vigorous ocean-based commercial
trade. Only in 1978, 545 years after the end of the seventh voyage, would
China again enthusiastically embrace open world trade as a core policy
of statecraft.
The North Atlantic Quest for Ocean Navigation
On the other side of Eurasia, a very pioneering king of a small nation, King
Henry the Navigator of Portugal, was encouraging naval exploration and
advances in navigational technology with Portuguese caravels venturing
down the coast of west Africa. Eventually those farsighted efforts would
culminate with the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias reaching the
southern tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope, in 1488. Then, with the help
of Arab or Indian sailors in the Indian Ocean, Vasco da Gama sailed around
the southern tip of Africa to the Calicut coast of southern India in 1498.
The main reason that Europeans were searching for a sea route to Asia
was the knock-on effect of the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire. In 1453,
the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II defeated the Byzantine emperor Con-
stantine XI Palaiologos and occupied Constantinople. With the Ottoman
Empire reigning in the newly named Istanbul, the ancient silk routes and
sea routes to Asia were at risk. (The sea routes involved Mediterranean
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99
trade to a port in Egypt or the Levant, land portage to the Indian Ocean
via Suez or the Arabian Peninsula, and then sea-based trade with Arab
merchants to India or China.) Navigation in the eastern Mediterranean
was under the threat of the Ottoman fleet, and the challenge of finding an
alternative sea route to Asia became urgent.
The rulers of Western Europe gained a new and keen interest in ocean-
based navigation. Suddenly, the countries of the North Atlantic (Spain,
Portugal, Britain, France, and Holland) had the upper hand of geography
compared with the previous longtime leaders of east-west trade, Genoa,
Venice, and Byzantium. Fittingly, in 1492, the same year that saw the
completion of the Christian reconquest of Spain from the long reign of
Islamic powers, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella sponsored the voyage
of Christopher Columbus, who proposed to sail west across the Atlantic to
find a new sea route to Asia. (The third act of 1492, sadly, was the expulsion
of the Jews from Spain.)
The rest, one might say, is history. Rather than reaching India, Columbus
stumbled upon the Americas (figure 6.2), though he still believed he had
reached India. Vasco da Gama, for his part, sailed from Lisbon and made
Columbus’s First Voyage, 1492–1493
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100
it to India and back in 1498–99 (figure 6.3). The race was now on, initially
between Portugal and Spain, to earn the spoils from these two historic
breakthroughs. More fundamentally, these two voyages reconnected the
entire inhabited world for the first time in more than ten thousand years,
ever since the rising ocean level at the end of the Pleistocene had sub-
merged the Beringia land bridge between Asia and North America.
The Columbian Exchange
As noted by the great environmental historian Alfred Crosby, Columbus’s
voyages produced much more than a meeting of Europeans and Native
Americans. They created a sudden conduit for the unprecedented two-way
exchange of species between the Old World and the New—plants, animals,
and disastrously, pathogens. This two-way exchange, which Crosby calls the
Vasco da Gama’s First Voyage, 1497–1499
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101
Columbian exchange, was biologically unprecedented, with profound con-
sequences that have lasted to the present day.3
The most obvious effect was the exchange of crops between the Old World
and the New, along with the introduction of many domesticated animals into
the Americas for the first time. The Americas offered the Old World such
staples as maize, potatoes, and tomatoes. In return, the Old World offered
wheat and rice, crops that had never before been cultivated in the Americas.
Suddenly, too, there were farm animals: horses in North America for the first
time in ten thousand years, along with cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. Addictive
crops also flowed in both directions: tobacco from the Americas to Europe,
and sugarcane to the Americas, a crop that would fundamentally transform
the Caribbean and the European economies. Other crops in the two-way
exchange are shown in figure 6.4.
The arrival of Europeans and their livestock also brought Old World
diseases to the Americas, diseases that that the indigenous populations in
the Americas had never previously encountered and to which they there-
fore had no genetic or acquired immunity. The Old World delivered almost
all of the pathogens in a one-way exchange to the Americas; few, if any,
The Columbian Exchange of Crops, Animals and Pathogens
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102
diseases were transferred from the Americas to the Old World. The rea-
son is that most of the diseases of the Old World began in animal reser-
voirs, notably in domesticated farm animals, which were not present in the
Americas. Since the indigenous Americans had few domesticated farm ani-
mals, they had few novel zoonotic (animal-to-human) diseases to transmit
to the European arrivals.
The list of newly arrived diseases from Europe was long and deadly
including smallpox, influenza, typhus, measles, diphtheria, and whooping
cough. Smallpox was the mass killer; it wiped out a shocking proportion of
the native populations encountering the newly arrived Europeans. African
slaves and slave traders also transmitted two mosquito-borne pathogens,
malaria and yellow fever, from Africa to the New World. There is a remain-
ing question as to whether new microbial pathogens were in fact transmit-
ted from the Americas back to Europe. One candidate is syphilis, which
had its first outbreak in Europe in 1495. There remains considerable con-
troversy among three possibilities: that syphilis existed in the Old World
but was not diagnosed; that syphilis was brought to Europe by Columbus’s
returning crew; or that European syphilis was a mutated form of the bacte-
rium Treponema brought back from the Americas. Recent evidence points
toward the New World origin of the disease.4
There is also a continuing debate about the demographic impact of the
Columbian exchange because there is substantial uncertainty about the size
of the native populations in the Americas prior to European arrival. Esti-
mates of the population of the Americas on the eve of Columbus’s arrival
have varied enormously, from a few million to 100 million or even more.
A recent very careful assessment by Alexander Koch and colleagues has
produced the estimates shown in table 6.1. According to these estimates,
the indigenous population in 1500 stood at 60.5 million. By 1600, the popu-
lation had declined by 90 percent, to just 6.1 million.5
One result of this catastrophic decline in population was a commensu-
rate decline in the land in the Americas used for farming. With land use
per capita around one hectare, the fall in population resulted in a reduction
in land use of some 55 million hectares. Much of this land returned to forest
or other vegetative cover, leading to a biological drawdown and storage of
atmospheric carbon, which the authors estimate to have been on the order
of 7.4 billion tons of carbon (GtC) between 1500 and 1600, or a drawdown
of roughly 3.5 parts per million of CO 2 in the atmosphere. This reduction
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103
of atmospheric CO 2 , in turn, likely played a role in the observed cooling of
the Earth’s temperature in the sixteenth century, which is estimated to have
been around 0.15 degrees Celsius. This slight cooling has sometimes been
termed the Little Ice Age in Europe in the 1500s.
Whatever the case with climate, the decline in native populations was
undoubtedly tragic and catastrophic. Disease was the major initiating fac-
tor, but war, plunder, conquest, and subjugation of indigenous communities
and destruction of their cultures also no doubt contributed. Even today,
the Americas remain sparsely populated relative to Europe and Asia. The
population densities of the continents (population per km2) as of 2018 are
estimated as follows: Asia, 95; Europe, 73; Africa, 34; North America, 22;
South America, 22; Australia, 3.
The Gunpowder Age and the High Seas
The strategic situation for the European nations was different in the Indian
Ocean. There, the Europeans faced populous and long-established societies
with sophisticated military capacities and, unlike in the Americas, a shared
pool of pathogens with the arriving Europeans. Yet the Europeans were
still able to gain a foothold to establish both a commercial and a military
presence. Over time, they came to dominate the Indian Ocean sea-lanes
Table
1500 1600
Population (millions) 60.5 6.1 (−90%)
Land use per capita (hectares) 1.04 1.0
Land use (millions of hectares) 61.9 6.1 (−90%)
Net carbon uptake (GtC) – 7.4 (from 1500 to 1600)
Source: Data from Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark M. Maslin, and Simon L. Lewis, “Earth System
Impacts of the Europrean Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492.” Science Direct 207 (March
2019): 13–36
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104
despite being interlopers from thousands of miles away. Their advantage
lay heavily with military technologies that had originally arrived from
China but were now turned to Europe’s advantage: gunpowder and well-
protected fortresses.
Gunpowder was first developed in China in the Song Dynasty, and the
earliest guns were developed there as well. Yet it was in Europe that these
technologies were pushed forward. Gunpowder and early guns may have
been brought to Europe by the Mongols, who had adopted the technology
from the Chinese. The European powers, heavily engaged in wars within
Europe, quickly innovated cannons of increasing power and accuracy and
placed them on oceangoing galleons and other ships.
These cannon-laden ships gave the European nations the military
advantage to establish new colonies, trading posts, and fortresses through-
out the Indian Ocean. While China and other Asian countries rather
quickly emulated the new artillery arriving from Europe, the early mili-
tary advantage of the European naval powers was enough to establish
beachheads in several strategic outposts. The gains in trade that resulted
for Europe were matched by losses in the authority, prestige, and trading
income of China. China’s tributary system largely collapsed, both because
of China’s self-imposed withdrawal from the Indian Ocean and because of
the rising military strength of the European powers in the Indian Ocean.
The New European Age of Inquiry
The fall of Constantinople and the discovery of the sea routes to the Ameri-
cas and Asia did more than reroute global trade. These events also rerouted
the European mind. The discovery of new lands based on new technologies
radically altered the European worldview. The Americas were not mentioned
in the Bible, nor were the species of plants and animals that the Europeans
discovered there. Here truly was something new under the sun.
Three other currents of the time contributed to a radical change in the
European worldview regarding empiricism, science, and technology. The
first was the flood of Greek scholars to Europe after the fall of Constan-
tinople to the Turks. A great concentration of philosophical learning, with
roots back to ancient Greece, suddenly showed up in Western Europe,
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105
with Greek scholars arriving to the Italian universities at Bologna, Naples,
Padua, and Siena.
This flood of scholarship was a prime factor in the second great tide of
the times, the arrival of the Renaissance in Western Europe. The redis-
covery of the arts, philosophy, and great learning of ancient Greece and
Rome was already under way in the first half of the fifteenth century but
was given an added spur by the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire. The
Renaissance had its roots as well in the growing commerce and urbaniza-
tion occurring throughout Western Europe, but notably in northern Italy,
the Netherlands, and southern Germany. Florence, with its burgeon-
ing trade and industry in woolens, was a center of the new Renaissance
learning and arts.
The third great event of the age was the invention (or, in part, the recep-
tion from China) of printing with movable type, led by Johannes Guten-
berg around 1439 in Mainz. This invention dramatically reduced the cost
of books and quickly led to the establishment of more than a hundred
printshops in Europe by 1480. An estimated 20 million book copies were
printed by 1500, and the numbers would soar in the coming century. The
age of learning was spurred immeasurably by the rapid dissemination of
knowledge through low-cost printing.
The cumulative impact of these trends was an era of revolution-
ary thought, as dogma and accepted wisdom flew by the wayside. The
1510s are certainly among the most remarkable years of human thought
in modern history. In 1511, the humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus of
Rotterdam published his satirical critique of the church, In Praise of Folly.
In 1513, Nicola Machiavelli of Florence published The Prince, his handbook
of power for European princes. In 1514, Nicolaus Copernicus, in Krakow,
circulated an early draft of his heliocentric theory, Commentariolus, which
was formally published three decades later. In the following year, 1515, Sir
Thomas More published Utopia, focusing European minds on the pos-
sibilities of political and social reform. And in 1517, Martin Luther posted
his Ninety-Five Theses on the church door in Wittenberg, setting off the
explosion of the Reformation.
While these remarkable events did not point to any single intellectual
outcome, they represented an unleashing of intellectual ferment across
Europe and led to remarkable advancements of knowledge. (The Refor-
mation also led to spasms of violence between Catholics and Protestants
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106
that would rage for centuries.) The intellectual ferment gathered into
Europe’s scientific revolution, with Galileo’s discoveries at the end of the
sixteenth century in turn leading the way to Newton’s physics in the mid-
seventeenth century. These historic breakthroughs were accompanied by a
surge in experimentation and an intense interest in engineering and new
technical devices, in part to address military challenges. At the start of the
seventeenth century, Francis Bacon enunciated, in Novum Organum, the
new scientific method of experimentation and the age’s emerging belief
that directed scientific research would improve the world, or perhaps con-
quer it. In 1660, Britain’s greatest minds, following the path set by Bacon,
launched a new Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowl-
edge, and in 1666, King Louis XIV of France launched the French Acad-
emy of Sciences, creating important new institutions to promote the new
scientific outlook.
Europe’s universities and scientific academies offered an astoundingly
fruitful knowledge network unmatched in scale and depth by any other
part of the world. Some of the new European sciences disseminated
globally through the remarkable work of the Jesuit order of the Catholic
Church.6 The order was founded with the approval of Pope Paul III in
1540 by ten graduates of the University of Paris led by Ignatius de Loyola.
Jesuit missionaries promptly set forth across the oceans to Portuguese and
Spanish settlements to establish new centers of missionizing and learning,
some of which would become Jesuit colleges and universities. The Jesuits
may plausibly be credited with creating the first global network of higher
learning, with Jesuit schools and printing houses quickly established across
Europe, and Jesuit missionary and teaching activities established overseas
in South America, India, Japan, China, the Philippines, and Portuguese
colonies of Africa.
These far-flung Jesuit missions collated new global knowledge of
botany and geography, and during the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies, brought many advances of European science and mathematics to
the Mughal court in India, the Ming Dynasty in China, early Tokugawa
Japan, and elsewhere. The Jesuits also displayed remarkable moral valor in
defending the rights of native populations against the depredations of the
Portuguese and Spanish colonists, often at extreme danger and duress to
the Jesuit missionaries themselves at the hands of the colonial authorities
and slave traders.
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The Ocean Age
107
The Birth of Global Capitalism
Europe’s new global-scale trade with the Americas and with Asia also
marked the birth of global capitalism, a new system of global-scale
economic organization. The new economic system was marked by four
distinctive features:
(1) Imperial power extended across oceans and ecological zones. The temperate-
zone nations of Western Europe colonized tropical-zone regions in the
Americas and Asia to produce tropical products such as tobacco, sugar-
cane, cotton, rubber, or minerals.
(2) Production systems were globalized, with plantations and mines estab-
lished in the colonized countries exporting primary commodities to the
home country for industrial processing, notably in the case of cotton.
(3) Profit-oriented, privately owned corporations were chartered by European
governments to carry out these global activities. The most important of
these new chartered companies were the British East India Company,
chartered in 1600, and the Dutch East India Company, chartered in 1602.
(4) These private companies maintained their own military operations and
foreign policies under the protection of their founding charters and their
states’ navies.
The European powers faced different challenges in the Americas and in
Asia. In the Americas, the main goal was to exploit the natural resources of
the New World, most importantly gold and silver, and over time, to produce
high-value crops for the European market. These included crops found in
the Americas, such as cacao, cotton, rubber, and tobacco, and crops brought
by the Europeans from Africa and Asia to plant in the Americas, notably
sugar, coffee, and rice.
In Asia, the first aim was to gain control over parts of Asian trade,
including spices from the Indonesia archipelago, cotton fabrics from India,
and silks and porcelains from China. Before 1500, trade in these commodi-
ties was largely in the hands of Arab, Turkish, and Venetian intermediar-
ies, meaning high prices in European markets. The Atlantic powers aimed
to cut out the middlemen and profit directly from European-Asian trade.
Later, as European countries and private companies extended their military
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108
sway over parts of coastal Asia, they aimed to control local production as
well as trade and to repress the export of Asian finished goods to Europe
(e.g., Indian textiles sold in European markets) in order to protect nascent
industries in Europe.
The powers of trade and production were vested in private companies
that became the forerunners of today’s multinational corporations. The
British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company were
given monopolies by their respective governments to trade in the East
Indies, with the goal of wresting control of the trade away from Portugal
and Spain, which in turn had taken it from the Arabs and others. Britain
and Holland, as late arrivals to Indian Ocean trade, would have to fight
wars with Portugal and Spain to win their place in global trade. The British
East India Company not only vanquished its rivals, but in time vanquished
India as well.7
Europe’s Scramble for Global Empire
Europe’s discovery of new lands in the Atlantic Ocean and the Americas set
off a brutal battle for global empire, one that continues today. The first new
colonies after 1450 were in the Atlantic Ocean islands and the Americas,
and then in Asia and Africa. The seafaring countries of the North Atlantic
would take the lead: Portugal, Spain, Holland, and Britain, with France,
Russia, Germany, and Italy entering the race for overseas colonies later.
Henry the Navigator’s expeditions around West Africa set off the
scramble with the discovery of the Cape Verde islands in 1456. Portugal
colonized these uninhabited tropical islands six years later, in 1462, mak-
ing Cape Verde the first tropical colony of a European country. When
the Spanish reconquest was completed in 1492, enabling Spain’s Christian
monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella to turn their attention to oceanic trade,
they backed Columbus’s attempt to find a western sea route to Asia in
order to counter Portugal’s attempts to find a southern sea route around
Africa. Columbus’s discovery of the Caribbean islands set up a scramble for
colonial possessions between the two Iberian powers.
Portugal asserted that it had the rights to all “southern lands” based
on its earlier discoveries. Spain’s monarchs turned to the Spanish pope
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109
Alexander VI, the second pope of the House of Borgia, whom they knew
would be sympathetic to the Spanish cause. In 1493, the pope recognized
the Spanish claims to the newly discovered lands and then, in 1494, bro-
kered an agreement between Portugal and Spain to divide the world.
According to the Treaty of Tordesillas (Spain), Portugal would own all
newly discovered possessions east of a longitude line set in the middle of
the Atlantic Ocean, 370 leagues west of Cape Verde. Spain would own all
newly discovered lands west of that meridian. (The precise meridian would
be in heated dispute thereafter because of differences in estimates about
the size of the Earth.)
Initially the dividing line referred just to the Atlantic Ocean, but with
the voyages to Asia and Magellan’s circumnavigation in 1519, it became nec-
essary to divide the world in Asia as well. The Treaty of Zaragoza in 1529
ostensibly drew the dividing line at the anti-meridian of the Tordesillas
line (the completion of a great circle, 180 degrees opposite) in the Indian
Ocean. Spain would have the lands west of this meridian, including the
Philippines, while Portugal would have the lands east of the line, including
the coveted spice islands in the Indonesian archipelago, the source of the
highly popular and lucrative nutmeg.
The world’s newly discovered lands were thus to be divided between
two Catholic nations, Portugal and Spain. Yet other newcomers had quite
different ideas. From the early sixteenth century onward, two other rising
Atlantic powers, Britain and Holland, both part of the Reformation that
rejected papal authority, aggressively contested the papal treaties. Eventu-
ally Britain would triumph, winning the greatest global empire by the nine-
teenth century. In its early naval forays, Britain chose to explore a northwest
passage to Asia, one that would not directly confront Portugal and Spain in
the tropics. Hence came the British discoveries along the northern coast of
North America, today’s New England and Canadian coasts.
But Britain’s voyages failed to find a northwest passage to India. As a
result, Britain resorted first to piracy and then to outright military con-
frontation to challenge the Portuguese and Spanish claims. Britain’s naval
heroes, such as Sir Francis Drake, were simply pirates or terrorists from
Spain’s point of view. As the sixteenth century progressed, Britain gained
mastery over naval design, building fast and maneuverable galleons that
could threaten Spain’s warships. The decisive showdown came in 1588, when
the Spanish monarch decided to invade Britain to put down the upstart
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110
nation. The effort failed disastrously, with Britain’s defeat of the Spanish
armada, a signal event in military history that put Britain on the path to
global power and Spain on the path of imperial decline.
With its growing naval power, Britain entered the imperial fray with
Portugal and Spain in the East Indies as well as in the Caribbean. In 1600,
Queen Elizabeth chartered the British East India Company and granted
it a monopoly of trade in the East Indies. This was quickly followed by the
Dutch East India Company (VOC), chartered in 1602; the French East
India Company following several decades later in 1664. From the start,
trade, warfare, and colonization were inextricably linked.
Spain and Portugal were the first European nations to establish global
empires in the sixteenth century, with Britain and Holland scrambling to
catch up in the seventeenth century. The Spanish and Portuguese empires
around 1580 are shown in figure 6.5, with the effects of the Treaties of
Tordesillas and Zaragoza evident. Spain controlled, or at least claimed to
Spanish Portuguese Overseas Empires, With Papal Lines
of Demarcation
PORTUGAL SPAIN
Line of Pope Alexander VI (Bull Inter Caetera, 1493) Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) Treaty of Zaragoza (1529)
Colonial demarcation lines between Castille/Spain and Portugal in the 15th and 16th Centuries
MOZAMBIQUE
Bombay
Nagasaki
EAST TIMOR BRAZILPortuguese empire
Spanish empire
ANGOLA
CAPE VERDE
PORTUGAL SPAIN
Line of Pope Alexander VI (Bull Inter Caetera, 1493)
Colonial demarcation lines between Castille/Spain and Portugal in the 15th and 16th Centuries
MOZAMBIQUE
Bombay
Nagasaki
EAST TIMOR BRAZILPortuguese empire
Spanish empire
ANGOLA
CAPE VERDE
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111
control, the lands of the Americas other than Brazil and eastern North
America (mainly claimed by Britain and Holland), as well as the Phil-
ippines and other islands in the western Pacific. Spain also had coastal
possessions around Africa. Portugal’s empire included Brazil, Atlantic
islands, coastal settlements around Africa, and settlements throughout the
Indian Ocean.
By 1700, the world’s division of power was as shown in figure 6.6. The
great land powers of Asia included the Qing Dynasty in China, the Mughal
Empire in India, the Safavid Empire in Persia, and the Ottoman Empire in
West Asia. The New World was now divided among four European pow-
ers: Portugal, Spain, Britain, and France. The Dutch Republic had been
knocked out of the running by Britain’s victories in three British-Dutch
wars of the seventeenth century. Dutch New Amsterdam became British
New York as of 1664, with a temporary reversion to the Dutch in 1673 that
was then reversed in 1674.
World Empires and Selected Nations, 1700.
Map by Network Graphics
New Spain
Peru Brazil
Guiana
Cuba
Canada
Acadia France
Britain
Japan - Tokugawa Shogunate
Norway
Portugal
Morocco
African Kingdoms
New Spain
Peru
Guiana
Cuba
Canada
Acadia
Spanish Main
Inuit Peoples
Greenland
Russia wayyyyyyyyyyyNorw
Britain Netherlands
Qing
apan - Tokuga Shogunate
Ja
QingQingQingQingQing
Mughal Empire
Tibet
Spain
Aboriginal Peoples
g
Fran
Britain
Portugal
Morocco
nce
apainaaaiSpSpSpSpSpSpSpSpSppSppppaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiipapppppppppppp
African Kingdoms
Bantu Peoples
Berbers
Ottoman Empire Korea
Britain
Major European Colonial Powers
Netherlands
France
Portugal
Russia
Spain
QQQQQQ
Oman Empire
dddsdsddsdsndddsddsddddddddlaandaaannllll nddddddddddnddddddddddaannaaaannnnnnnlaaalalaa
ghhghhghghalalalalalMMMMMMMMMugMugMugMugMugMuMMMuMMMMMMMMM epipipipppp rerereeeeeeeeeempmpmpmpmpmmEmEmmmmmmmmmm
TibeTibeTibeTibeTibeTibeTibeTibeTibeTibebebebetttttttttttttttt
nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnootttottottootOOOOtOtOtOOtttttooottottottoOOOtOttOttotttoOOttottot ommamammmamamamamamamamamamamamaa eeeeeeeEmpEmEmpE pEE ppEEEE pppppppppppEEmpEmpEmpEmEmEmpEmpEEEEEmEmpEmpEmpEEmpEmpEEmpEmpmEmpmEEEEEEEEEEEE pipipipipipipppp rereerereppppppppppppppppppppp
Omann Empire
Safavid Empire
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112
Over time, the British Empire would come to achieve global naval
dominance. The great naval historian of the late nineteenth century,
Alfred Thayer Mahan, attributed Britain’s long-term economic and impe-
rial success and the long-term declines of France, Holland, Portugal,
and Spain, to Britain’s naval superiority over its rivals. In Mahan’s 1890
book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783, he explained
that national wealth depended on long-distance trade, long-distance
trade depended on overseas colonies, and the security of overseas colo-
nies depended on naval preeminence.8 In Mahan’s telling, Spain’s decline
(and Portugal’s, under the shared crown) was inevitable after the British
defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588. Holland’s relative decline in the
seventeenth century followed the decline of Holland’s naval power and
Holland’s subsequent reliance on the British navy. France’s loss of empire,
in Mahan’s view, was determined by its naval defeats by the British in the
Seven Years’ War of 1756–63.
Russia’s Land Empire of the North
While Europe’s Atlantic states were vying for transoceanic empires, Russia
emerged in the eighteenth century as Eurasia’s vast land empire of the
north, seen in figure 6.6. As the inheritor of the Mongol and Timurid
empires, Russia became history’s second largest contiguous empire by size,
22 million km2 at its peak in 1895, second only to the Mongol empire’s
23 million km2 at its maximum extent in 1270. Only the British Empire was
larger, with a land area across the globe summing to 35 million km2 at its
maximum extent in 1920.9
The Russian Empire is geographically distinct: an empire of the north-
ern climate. Taking the region of the Commonwealth of the Independent
States (CIS) as our reference point, the region is approximately 70 percent
in the D (cold) climate, 7 percent in E (polar) climate, and 19 percent in the
B (dry climate), with essentially no land area in the tropical or temperate
climates, as we see in table 6.2. Whereas Europe west of Russia is largely
temperate (around 71 percent by area), and Asia is a mix of tropical, dry, and
temperate regions (with A, B, and C climates totaling 76 percent by area),
Russia is cold, polar, or dry.
Russia’s climate had three overwhelming implications throughout the
history of Russia until the twentieth century. First, grain yields were very
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113
low in the short growing seasons of the far north and the steppe regions
in the south of the empire. Second, as a result, populations remained small
and the population densities were far lower than in Europe and Asia. In
1400, for example, the CIS lands had a population density of fewer than
one person per km2, less than one-tenth the population density of Europe
and Asia. Third, as farm families struggled to feed themselves in the harsh
environment, much less provide any surplus for the market or for taxation,
the Russian population remained overwhelming rural until the twentieth
century. The HYDE 3.1 estimates put the Russian urbanization rate at
just 2 percent as late as 1800, roughly one-tenth the urbanization rate of
Western Europe.10
Russia’s peasant farmers were not only impoverished and sparsely
settled but also mostly enserfed until their liberation from serfdom in
1861 by imperial decree. Thus, the long legacy of Russia’s unique geog-
raphy was a sparse, illiterate, and overwhelmingly unfree rural popula-
tion that formed the sociological crucible of the Bolshevik Revolution
of 1917. Under Soviet communism in the twentieth century, the lands of
the Russian Empire were industrialized and urbanized via a brutal top-
down one-party state that claimed tens of millions of lives in the course
Table
2 2
A 0.0 0.0 17.7 – – 11 – 20 243
B 18.7 1.0 40.4 1 10 4 19 91 83
C 0.5 70.7 17.7 3 12 21 80 128 348
D 70.0 22.9 8.0 0 3 8 11 48 153
E 6.6 2.3 0.0 0 0 – 0 0 –
H 4.2 3.1 16.2 2 10 2 43 115 40
Total – – – 1 10 8 13 106 157
Source: Author’s calculations using HYDE and CIESIN data. See data appendix for details.
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114
of forced industrialization and the collectivization of farmlands—a “sec-
ond serfdom”—that was carried out by Joseph Stalin’s regime in the late
1920s and 1930s.
Insatiable Greed of the Empire Builders
The remarkable scramble by the European powers for riches, glory, and
colonies in the New World and Asia, and the privatization of wealth-
seeking via the new joint-stock companies, ushered in a new ethos of greed.
It was one thing to exploit the native populations and grab their land; it was
another to create an ethos that justified such actions. The Christian virtues
of temperance and charity had long preached self-control over the passions
for wealth and glory. A new morality was needed to justify the remarkable
efforts toward conquest and the subjugation of whole populations. Over
time, the justification was the idea that conquest was a God-given right,
even a responsibility, to bring civilization to the heathens. Success, more-
over, was a sign of God’s favor and providence. There were demurrals, to be
sure. The Spanish monarchy, for instance, eventually outlawed the enslave-
ment of native populations in the Americas in the New Laws of 1542. Yet
those demurrals were limited, to say the least. The age of global empire
was also an age of monumental cruelty, with ruthless greed built into the
emerging capitalist order.
By the eighteenth century, a new ideology was taking form, especially
in Britain, that “greed is good” (to use a recent summary formulation),
because greed spurs a society’s efforts and inventiveness. By giving vent to
greed, the logic goes, societies can best harness the insatiable ambitions,
great energies and ingenuity of their citizens. While greed by itself might
be unappetizing and seem to be antisocial, the unleashing of greed could in
fact lead to the common good. Thus was born the idea that Adam Smith
would crystalize as the “invisible hand”—the idea that the pursuit of self-
interest by each person promotes the common interest of society as a whole
as if by an invisible hand. Smith himself was a moralist and a believer in
personal virtues, self-restraint, and justice. Yet Smith’s concept of the invis-
ible hand quickly became an argument to let market forces play out as they
might, no matter the distributional consequences.
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115
The first statement of this counterintuitive idea came not from Smith but
from a London-based pamphleteer and poet at the start of the eighteenth
century, Bernard Mandeville, in an ingenious poem called “The Fable of the
Bees.” In the poem, greedy and self-interested bees create such energy that
the beehive becomes the marvel of the bee kingdom. Vice produces virtues.
With wit, Mandeville put it this way:
Thus every Part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradice;
Flatter’d in Peace, and fear’d in Wars
They were th’Esteem of Foreigners,
And lavish of their Wealth and Lives,
The Ballance of all other Hives.
Such were the Blessings of that State;
Their Crimes conspired to make ’em Great;
And Vertue, who from Politicks
Had learn’d a Thousand cunning Tricks,
Was, by their happy Influence,
Made Friends with Vice: And ever since
The worst of all the Multitude
Did something for the common Good.
The worst of the multitude, Mandeville claims, creates the common good.
It’s a view, alas, that would not have been shared by the conquered peoples
on the receiving end of European imperialism.
The Intertwining of State and Capital
In the theory of free trade, government is to stay clear of market forces, let-
ting supply and demand play out as they may. This doctrine, I have empha-
sized, fails to address the distributional consequences of market forces that
can leave multitudes impoverished. It also fails to describe capitalism as it
is, and as it was from the start. Not only have capitalist enterprises often
been extraordinarily ruthless in their pursuit of profit; they have often,
even typically, had the power of the state at their disposal to magnify their
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116
profits and shift losses to others, sometimes to fellow citizens but more
often to the weak and vulnerable of other societies.
Consider Britain’s entry into global markets in its competition with Spain
and Portugal. Queen Elizabeth was a personal investor in 1577 in Francis
Drake’s plan to circumnavigate the globe on his vessel the Golden Hind.
Yet in addition to exploration, the real plan was piracy: to loot the Spanish
fleet bringing bullion and other treasures back from South America. In 1578,
Drake captured a Spanish galleon with a phenomenal haul of gold, silver,
jewels, porcelain, and other treasure. On Drake’s return, the pirated gains
were shared with the queen, who used them to pay off the national debt.
Drake became a national hero, and went on to serve as vice admiral in the
defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588.
In 1600, the launch of the East India Company marked an even more
decisive breakthrough to modern capitalism. Here was a joint-stock com-
pany formed specifically to engage in multinational trade. Once again, the
private investors could count on the power and beneficence of the state.
Queen Elizabeth charted the East India Company as a monopoly to
engage in all trade east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits
of Magellan. From the start, the company paid bribes and gifts to the court
and to leading politicians while acting as a state within a state in its deal-
ings in India, complete with private army, the powers of bribery, and the
protections of limited liability.
Indigenous Populations and African Slaves in the New World
The history of the New World quickly became the drama of three dis-
tinct groups of humanity. The first were the indigenous peoples of the
Americas, struck hard by Old World diseases and conquest but continu-
ing to fight for physical, cultural, and political survival. The second were
the European conquerors and settlers. The third were the African slaves
brought by the millions to work the mines and plantations of the New
World. The cauldron of conquest and stratification has shaped the Amer-
icas to this day as a region of sky-high inequality and conflict, yet one
that would try over the centuries to forge an avowedly multiethnic and
multiracial society.
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117
The European conquerors came for glory and wealth, but grappled from
the start with the fundamental question of who was going to produce that
wealth. The hope, of course, was for easy riches—Eldorado, the city of
gold, based on imagined vast and easy riches. The Spanish found gold and
silver mines that they ruthlessly exploited in the sixteenth century, flood-
ing Europe with precious metals, but even the mines needed workers for
the backbreaking, life-threatening labor. The plantations were also brutal,
requiring harsh physical labor in tropical conditions, causing heat stress,
extreme vulnerability to a host of tropical diseases, and very often early
death. Enticing European settlers to the tropical lands was a difficult task
from the start, especially as news got back to Europe about the grim reali-
ties in the New World.
The indigenous populations survived in large numbers mainly in the
less accessible mountain regions of Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central
America) and the Andes (today’s Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru).
Native American nations also survived in the sparsely settled regions of
North America. Yet deaths were rampant in the Caribbean, along the
Brazilian coast, and wherever the Europeans launched intensive mining
and plantation operations. Initially, the Spanish conquerors gave grants of
land and authority, so-called encomiendas, to leading figures, the encomen-
deros (those receiving the grants), empowering them to enslave the natives
living in their lands. A heated debate quickly ensued among the Spanish
elites, including the church and the monarchy, concerning the rights of the
indigenous populations. The famed Franciscan friar Bartolome de las Casas
argued that the Indians had souls and as such could not be enslaved or mis-
treated by the encomenderos. Remarkably, the monarchy agreed and in 1542
issued the Leyes Nuevos (New Laws), outlawing the enslavement of indig-
enous Americans. This act must be regarded as a powerful case of moral
reasoning triumphing over power and greed, all too rare in human history.
Yet the net outcome was hardly satisfactory. Not only did brutal treat-
ment of the native population continue, but the labor shortages that
resulted from the New Laws and the decline of indigenous populations
quickly gave way to decisions to import slaves in vast numbers from Africa.
Brazil under Portuguese and Spanish rule became the main destination for
the slave trade for the next two centuries. The British, for their part, did not
hesitate to join the slave trade with enthusiasm, turning the Caribbean into
slave colonies for hundreds of years.
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118
Figure 6.7 illustrates quantitatively the massive movement of slaves
from Africa to the Americas in the course of an estimated thirty-six thou-
sand voyages between 1514 and 1866, as well as smaller transport of slaves
to North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and other destinations in the
Arabian Sea. The map is based in part on a painstaking calculation of the
number of Africans transported in the brutal “middle passage” from Africa
to the Americas. Most African slaves brought to the New World came
from the Gulf of Guinea and farther south along the Atlantic coast of
Africa, especially present-day Angola, and were sent in largest quantities
to Brazil and the Caribbean. Some were sent to North America, where
slave labor would take hold as the basis of the cotton empire in the colo-
nies that would become the southern United States after the American
War of Independence.
The Slave Trade from Africa, 1500-1900
Source: Eltis & Richardson, ATLAS OF THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
(2010), Map 1 from accompanying web site, Overview of Slave Trade out of Africa, 1500–1900.
Reproduced with the permission of Yale University Press.
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119
African slaves powered the new plantation and mining economies of the
Spanish, Portuguese, and British colonies, especially in the tropical regions.
The most important plantation commodity was sugar, grown in north-
east Brazil and the Caribbean, which together accounted for the vast pre-
ponderance of slave arrivals to the Americas, and also the Peruvian coast.
Slaves were also directed to the mines of Mexico and the Andes, to the
coffee plantations of Brazil and Mesoamerica, and to tobacco and cotton
plantations in the southern United States. Slaveholding was mainly a trop-
ical matter; free laborers from Europe would not accept the deadly con-
ditions of farmwork in the neotropics, especially after falciparum malaria
became prevalent following its introduction into the Americas from Africa
by the slave trade itself. While some slavery existed in the temperate zones
of the Americas, slavery never took hold in large numbers and was abol-
ished far earlier in the temperate zones than in the tropics. The northern
U.S. states abolished or began to phase out slavery by the early 1800s, while
slavery in the southern states ended only with the Confederacy’s defeat in
1865 in the U.S. Civil War. Slavery ended in Spanish Cuba only in 1886,
and in Brazil in 1888.
With the slave plantations in the Americas arose the infamous three-way
trade pattern commonly known as the “triangular trade.” The slave colonies
of the Americas imported slaves and exported slave-made products—sugar,
cotton, and tobacco—to Europe. Europe imported the commodities and
exported manufactured goods, including textiles, weapons, and metals, to
Africa. And African chieftains exported slaves to European slave traders in
return for Europe’s manufactured goods.
The colonization of the Americas and the expanded trade with Asia
also unleashed a new frenzy of consumerism in Europe, marked by soaring
demand for spices from Asia and Africa. The most sought after products
were tea, silks, and porcelain from China; fine textiles from India; coffee
from Yemen; and a trio of addictive products from America’s new colo-
nial plantations—sugar, coffee, and tobacco. Portugal and Spain brought
sugarcane cultivation from Iberia to Brazil and the Caribbean. The Dutch
first brought coffee cultivation to their Caribbean colony, Martinique, from
plantations on Java. Tobacco, native to the Americas and smoked by Native
Americans, was introduced to the European colonizers, who then estab-
lished tobacco plantations in the Caribbean and on the North American
mainland, especially around Virginia.
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120
Sugar, coffee, and tobacco all set off a surge of demand in Europe and,
in turn, soaring profitability of plantations in the Americas. All three crops,
however, were arduous to grow in the unhealthy tropical and subtropical
climates of the Caribbean, Brazil, and the southern parts of North America.
The demand for African slaves, therefore, soared as well. Around half of all
African slaves brought to the Americas worked in the sugar plantations,
mostly in the Caribbean, which overtook Brazil in sugarcane production
by the eighteenth century. The overriding demographic reality of the sugar
plantations was the shockingly high mortality rate, with up to a third of the
newly arrived slaves dying within their first year.
In total, an estimated 14 million Africans were carried as slaves during
this period. This was truly a grim and horrific stage of global capitalism.
The cruelty that accompanied the development of the modern world econ-
omy must not be forgotten, because that cruelty shows up in other ways
today; human trafficking is one of the greatest examples, which also con-
tinues in the form of bonded labor and child labor as part of global supply
chains. Humanity is not done with the horrific abuse of others in pursuit of
greed and profit.
Feeding Europe’s Factories: Cotton
The British and Dutch East India companies may rightly be considered the
first corporations of modern capitalism. As profit-driven and greed-based
joint-stock companies, they set the tone and behavior for what was to come.
As described by historian Sven Beckert in his book Empire of Cotton: A
Global History, much of their early business in the 1600s was trade in cotton
fabrics, purchased in India for sale in Africa to slave traders and in Europe
to the growing urban population. Then, in the eighteenth century, as Britain
protected its domestic textile manufacturers against Indian imports, British
manufacturers increasingly demanded a supply of raw cotton. The demand
multiplied with the mechanization of spinning and weaving, and then with
the introduction of steam power into the textile mills.
As Beckert observes, this made Britain’s cotton manufacturing “the
first major industry in human history that lacked locally procured raw
materials.”11 Thus began a new episode of global capitalism, with British
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121
businesses frantically seeking to secure increased access to raw cotton
supplies for Britain’s booming textile industry. The “salvation,” of course,
came in the form of slaves, growing the “white gold” in the plantations of
the Caribbean and Brazil. Yet even then, upheaval hit the industry with
the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue in 1791, giving birth to an indepen-
dent Haiti. Britain’s raw material inputs were suddenly in jeopardy.
Once again, a solution arose, seemingly providentially from the indus-
try’s point of view. The U.S. South would provide the land and the slave
labor to feed Britain’s mills. Beckert explains the essence of this solution:
What distinguished the United States from virtually every other cotton-
growing area in the world was planters’ command of nearly unlimited
suppliers of land, labor, and capital, and their unparalleled political power.
In the Ottoman Empire and India, as we know, powerful indigenous rul-
ers controlled the land, and deeply entrenched social groups struggled
over its use. In the West Indies and Brazil, sugar planters competed for
land, labor, and power. The United States, and its plentiful land, faced no
such encumbrances.12
This alliance of British industry and capital with U.S. slavery was to
last from the 1790s until the Civil War. Far from slavery being an out-
moded system alien to modern capitalism, slavery was at the very cut-
ting edge of global capitalism, creating vast wealth on the foundations
of untold misery. The brutality of the Anglo-American system is under-
scored by the fact that the United States was essentially the only country
in the world where it took a civil war to end slavery. Even tsarist Russia
ended serfdom peacefully, with Tsar Alexander’s Emancipation Decree of
1861, just as the United States, ostensibly the land of freedom, was sliding
into civil war.
Global Empire and Global War
Europe’s global empires, spanning oceans and continents for the first time,
unleashed another new phenomenon, global war, also spanning oceans and
continents. From the late seventeenth century on, major conflicts among
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122
the European powers involved battles on several continents. The implica-
tions were dire. More and more of the world would be swept into Europe’s
wars, so that eventually the two world wars of the twentieth century each
claimed tens of millions of lives across the globe.
The Nine Years’ War of 1688–97 might be considered the first global war,
as it was fought simultaneously in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The
main European combatants were France under Louis XIV facing a coali-
tion of Britain, Holland, and the Holy Roman Empire. The main theaters
of the war were in Europe, along France’s borders, following the attempts
by Louis XIV to expand France’s influence into neighboring countries.
Early in the war with France, Holland’s monarch William of Orange
successfully invaded Britain and took the throne from King James II, an
invasion subsequently known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The war
became global when news of the conflict reached the Americas and Asia.
In North America, the war, known as King William’s War, mainly involved
British colonialists and their Native American allies against French colo-
nialists and their Native American allies. It would be the start of several
wars between France and Britain fought in North America. In Asia, the
fighting was between the French and Anglo-Dutch forces in southeast
India, notably Pondicherry. While the battles in the Americas and India
were not decisive, they set the pattern for the coming centuries of Euro-
pean wars spilling over to the Americas, Asia, and eventually Africa as well.
The next global war was the Seven Years’ War between 1756 and 1763.
This one was a five-continent conflict—Europe, North America, South
America, Africa, and Asia—between two European grand coalitions, one
led by Britain, with Portugal, Prussia, and other German principalities, and
the other led by France, with the Austrian (Holy Roman) Empire, Spain,
and Sweden. This war, like the Nine Years’ War, began in Europe as a con-
test between Austria and Prussia for control over Silesia, but it quickly
spread worldwide. In the Americas, it was preceded by skirmishes between
British and French colonists but after 1756 led to a broad contest for terri-
tories throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. The main result of the
war in the Americas was France’s loss of territories to Britain and Spain. In
Africa, the British navy conquered France’s colony in Senegal, and much of
the colony was transferred to Britain by treaty at the conclusion of the war.
In southern India, France’s holdings were reduced by British victories.
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123
France quickly got even with its rival Great Britain during the U.S.
War of Independence, beginning in 1776. France’s active intervention on
the side of the breakaway British colonies was decisive for the Ameri-
cans’ victory in their war of independence. Yet in the escalating con-
test between France and Britain, each victory contained the seeds of a
future reversal. France’s heavy financial outlays in support of Ameri-
can independence contributed to France’s financial crisis of the 1780s
that in turn fomented the unrest leading to the 1789 French Revolu-
tion. The French Revolution, in turn, unleashed a new round of bloody
European wars from 1793 to 1815. The latter part of the French Revolu-
tionary Wars became known as the Napoleonic Wars with the rise of
Napoleon to First Consul of France in 1799 and then to Emperor of
France in 1804.
The Napoleonic Wars, the bloodiest yet, cost millions of civilian and mil-
itary casualties and was again fought in theaters across several continents,
including Europe, North America, South America, Africa (Egypt), the
Caucasus, and the Indian Ocean. These were “total wars,” with a mass mobi-
lization of the population, mass conscription, and massive civilian casualties.
The main geopolitical results of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 were the rise of
Britain to European supremacy over the oceans and the nearly fatal weak-
ening of the Portuguese and Spanish empires, both of which had been con-
quered by Napoleon. Within a few years of the end of the Napoleonic Wars,
both Portugal and Spain would lose most of their colonial possessions in
the Americas to wars of independence.
As of 1830, Europe’s empires were as shown in figure 6.8. The Americas
were now mostly independent nations, with Britain maintaining colonial
possessions in Canada and the Caribbean and other European countries
maintaining some island colonies in the Caribbean. Africa was as yet colo-
nized only on the coasts, other than the British and Dutch settlements in
the hinterlands of South Africa. The rest of Africa succumbed to Euro-
pean imperialism only toward the end of the nineteenth century, for rea-
sons described in the next chapter. In Asia, Britain now dominated much
of India and Malaya, as well as Australia, while Holland maintained its
colonies in the Indonesian archipelago. Spain and Portugal each held some
Asian colonies as well, including the Philippines under Spain and eastern
Timor under Portugal.
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124
Much of the ensuing drama of nineteenth-century economic develop-
ment would take place on the mainland of Europe, which pioneered the
new age of industrial globalization.
Adam Smith’s Summation of the Age of Global Empire
Adam Smith, the great inventor of modern economic thought, living in
Scotland in the eighteenth century, published his magnum opus, The Wealth
of Nations, in 1776. As a great humanist, he observed the consequences of
globalization with a globalist perspective rather than British partiality.
(In his own work on moral sympathy, Smith spoke about the “impartial
spectator” as the vantage point for moral reasoning.) This is what Smith
had to say about this remarkable fourth age of globalization. I quote him
at length because it is wonderful to listen carefully to a great mind like
World Empires and Selected Nations, 1830
United States Mexico
Colombia
Peru Bolivia
Brazil
Canada (Brit)
Sweden
Denmark
AustriaFrance
Spain
Morocco Ladakh
India (Brit)
Japan
Phillipines (Spa)
East Indies (N.L.)
Goa (Por) Ceylon (Brit)
Persia
Ottoman
Britain
Major European Colonial Powers
Netherlands
France
Portugal
Russia
Spain
Australia (Brit)
AAAAAuAuAuAuAAAuAuuAAAAuAuAuuAAAAuAuAuAuAuuAAuAuAuuAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAuuuuuuuu tustustuss riaiaariaaausususus aaaa
Eaast Indi
rit)rit)
ttriaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaariaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
)))))Goa (Por)))))))))rr)))))))))))))))) Ceylon (BCeylon (Brr
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaPersPeP iPPP iii
mmmmmttttttottottott mmmmttttttotttt mOOOOOtOtOtOtOtOOOOOOOOOOOOOOtOOtOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO anananannnnnnno a
Oman
Saudi
Russia
African Kingdoms
Phillipin
hhhhhkhkhh
rit))))))))))))))
L dL ddLadaLadakkLadaLaL kLaLaLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
(BBdidididia (Ba (a (Ba (Ba (Ba (B(B(B((B(B(BBBB((B(B(B(B(B(B(B(BInndddndndndnndnnInnnnnnnnnnnn
))))a (Porrr))))))rrrrrrr)) man
RRussRuss aaiaia
Qing
South Africa (Brit)
Britain
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125
Smith’s reflecting on such pivotal events. His words inspire us to think
hard and with sympathy about our own times.
The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the
Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events
recorded in the history of mankind. Their consequences have already
been very great; but, in the short period of between two and three centu-
ries which has elapsed since these discoveries were made, it is impossible
that the whole extent of their consequences can have been seen. What
benefits or what misfortunes to mankind may hereafter result from those
great events, no human wisdom can foresee. By uniting, in some mea-
sure, the most distant parts of the world, by enabling them to relieve one
another’s wants, to increase one another’s enjoyments, and to encourage
one another’s industry, their general tendency would seem to be benefi-
cial. To the natives however, both of the East and West Indies, all the
commercial benefits which can have resulted from those events have
been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occa-
sioned. These misfortunes, however, seem to have arisen rather from
accident than from anything in the nature of those events themselves.
At the particular time when these discoveries were made, the superiority
of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans that they
were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those
remote countries. Hereafter, perhaps, the natives of those countries may
grow stronger, or those of Europe may grow weaker, and the inhabitants
of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of
courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the
injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights
of one another. But nothing seems more likely to establish this equal-
ity of force than that mutual communication of knowledge and of all
sorts of improvements which an extensive commerce from all countries
to all countries naturally, or rather necessarily, carries along with it.13
This wonderful statement is filled with humanity and relevance for us.
Smith is saying that the events leading to the fourth age of globalization—
the discovery of the sea routes linking Europe with the Americas and
with Asia—are the most significant events of human history because
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126
they united, “in some measure, the most distant parts of the world.” But
while this might have brought benefits for all of humanity through mutu-
ally beneficial trade (enabling the various parts of the world “to relieve
one another’s wants”), in fact they had as of Smith’s time brought benefits
to one part of humanity—namely, Western Europe—while bringing mis-
ery to the inhabitants of both the East and West Indies, who suffered from
Europe’s overwhelming power. After all, the Europeans came not merely to
trade but also to plunder and conquer.
Smith, remarkably, looks forward to a fairer and more balanced world,
one in which the inhabitants of the East and West Indies “may grow stron-
ger, or those of Europe may grow weaker,” in order to arrive at “an equality
of courage and force” that will enable “a mutual fear,” and thereby a mutual
respect. How will that come about, asks Smith? Through global trade itself.
As Smith puts it, commerce will necessarily bring about the equality of
force through the “mutual communication of knowledge and of all sorts
of improvements.” In short, trade will cause the spread of knowledge and
eventually cause the rebalancing of power. Smith is speaking about British
colonialism here, but he could just as easily be speaking about our time,
when China and other former colonies are achieving great advances in
technological capacity and military strength through their participation in
the global economy. Smith foretold a time when such a rebalancing would
lead to “some sort of respect for the rights of one another.” That indeed
should be the hope for our own time.
Some Lessons from the Ocean Age
The Ocean Age gave birth to global capitalism. For the first time in his-
tory, privately chartered for-profit companies engaged in complex, global-
scale production and trading networks. Private businesses, drunk with
greed, hired private armies, enslaved millions, bribed their way to privi-
leged political status at home and abroad, and generally acted with impu-
nity. But even beyond the private greed, it was an age of conquest and
unchecked competition among Europe’s powers. The world beyond the
oceans was up for grabs, and little would hold back the rapaciousness that
was unleashed as a result.
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127
Adam Smith’s masterwork, The Wealth of Nations, provided a template
for riches: global trade as the spur for specialization and rising produc-
tivity. Smith’s recipe worked beyond his wildest imagination. As we shall
see in the next phase of globalization, productivity began to rise rapidly
and persistently as new inventions expanded the market and thereby the
incentives for even more inventions. The process of self-feeding growth was
under way. The result would create a new kind of political power—a global
superpower—that would come to be known as the hegemonic power, a
global dominance achieved by Great Britain that outpaced even the scale
of power and accomplishment of the Roman Empire. But, as we shall see,
the gains for Britain and other major powers would often be reflected in
the misery of those under their whip in the Industrial Age.
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We have arrived at the sixth age of globalization, the Industrial Age, the one that created the modern world. For convenience I date this from 1800 to 2000, lasting two centuries. I could perhaps have put the starting date a bit earlier, say 1750, when industrialization began
to gather force in Britain, or I might have put it at 1820, after the Napole-
onic Wars, when the new peace in Europe would enable a continental-scale
transformation more rapid than any other in history. But no matter the
details, we can be certain of the overriding point: the sixth age is a period
of decisive transformation that was faster, deeper, and more extensive than
ever before in history. During just two centuries, everything changed about
how and where we live and how we govern ourselves.
At the start of the sixth age of globalization, around 1820, the world
was still overwhelmingly poor and rural. Perhaps 85 percent of the world’s
population sustained itself through farming, almost all of it at a level at
or near subsistence. Around 93 percent of the world lived in rural areas.
Most people never ventured far from their birthplace, often because
they were enslaved, enserfed, or bonded to the land and landowner in
some way. Extreme poverty was pervasive and life expectancy was short,
mainly because infant and child mortality rates were extremely high. By
2000, however, all had changed. The world had become almost half urban
(46.7 percent); average incomes had soared; average life expectancy had
7 The Industrial Age
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130
reached sixty-seven years (for 2000–2005).1 These remarkable changes are
summarized in table 7.1.
The texture of life also changed beyond recognition. From the quiet life
of villages, most of humanity now lived in the tumult of cities. From the
relative isolation of villages, humanity was now interconnected in a world-
wide web of nonstop data. From the slow pace of technological change
throughout most of human history, we arrived to a world of nonstop tech-
nological upheavals. And we arrived also to a world of ever-present exis-
tential worries, where human survival is threatened by our own creations,
whether nuclear weapons or global-scale environmental threats.
Certain key aspects of this remarkable sixth age of globalization are
coming to an end—most notably, the two hundred years of Anglo-
American dominance of the world economy and technology. And digital
technologies, discussed in the next chapter, are once again upending our
patterns of production and indeed our patterns of daily life. But to under-
stand our current era and the choices before us, we must understand the
Industrial Age, and how it created the modern economy.
A good year to start our investigation of industrialization is 1776. Four
remarkable events that year capture the essence of the story of the Indus-
trial Age. The first, as you might guess, is the birth of the United States
Table
Population 1 billion 6 billion
Rate of urbanization 7.3% 46.8%
Average GDP per person, PPP-adjusted (2018 prices) $1,200 (1820) $10,500
Extreme poverty rate 84% (1820) 25%
Life expectancy at birth 29 66
Sources: François Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson. “Inequality among World Citizens: 1820–1992.”
American economic review 92, no. 4 (2002): 727–44; James C Riley. “Estimates of regional and global life
expectancy, 1800–2001.” Population and development review 31, no. 3 (2005): 537–43; Kees Klein Goldewijk,
Arthur Beusen, and Peter Janssen. “Long-Term Dynamic Modeling of Global Population and Built-up Area
in a Spatially Explicit Way: Hyde 3.1.” The Holocene 20, no. 4 (2010): 565–73; Angus Maddison. “Statistics on
World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1-2008 AD.” Historical Statistics 3 (2010): 1–36.
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131
with its Declaration of Independence from Britain. That was indeed
a notable event in history, as it unleashed the forces that would create
America as a global power by the second half of the twentieth century. The
second event is one I have already mentioned many times: the publication
of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Here was a new guide to a modern
economy based on global reach and the global division of labor. The third
is another publication: Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire. Like Smith, Gibbon epitomizes the wisdom and humanity of the
eighteenth-century British Enlightenment. Gibbon’s masterwork reminds
us that world-dominant powers such as Rome decline, as occurred with
the British Empire in the twentieth century and is happening in its own
way with the United States in the early twenty-first century.
Yet in historical significance, the fourth event of 1776 is probably the
most significant. This is the year when the inventor James Watt success-
fully commercialized his new steam engine. We have discussed many
pivotal inventions throughout history: agriculture, animal domestication,
the alphabet, gunpowder, the printing press, ocean navigation, and oth-
ers. Yet with the possible exception of Gutenberg’s printing press, it is
very hard to think of an invention by a single inventor as consequential as
Watt’s steam engine (figure 7.1). The steam engine gave birth to the Indus-
trial Age and the modern economy. While the steam engine is not solely
responsible for economic modernity, without the steam engine most of
the other technological breakthroughs of the past two centuries would not
have been possible.2
Newton had declared “If I have seen further it is by standing on the
shoulders of giants.” Watt too made his great breakthroughs by building
on the innovations of worthy predecessors. Thomas Savery invented the
first modern steam engine in 1699, using steam created by burning coal
to pump water. The aim was to use the steam engine to pump water from
coal mines to raise the productivity of the mine. Savery’s breakthrough idea
was then advanced by Thomas Newcomen, who added the idea of moving
a piston with steam power. Savery’s pump worked by creating a tempo-
rary vacuum that forced water through the pump. Newcomen’s 1712 steam
engine used the steam to move a piston to pump the water. The coal mined
with the help of these steam engines was used mainly for heating homes in
Britain’s winter months. Later on, of course, the coal would be mined
for the steam engines themselves, which became the source of power for
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132
Britain’s railroads, steamships, and industrial factories, and notably for use
in massively scaled-up steel production.
Newcomen’s engine was deployed to pump water out of coal mines, but
it was not very efficient. It required an enormous input of energy and was
not economical to use for other applications. In the 1760s, James Watt,
employed in a workshop at the University of Glasgow in Scotland making
scientific instruments, began thinking about how to make Newcomen’s
steam engine more efficient. Brilliantly, Watt made two great innova-
tions to Newcomen’s engine. One involved the translation of the steam
energy into motion. Rather than the alternating beam that Newcomen
had used, Watt introduced rotary motion into a steam engine. Watt’s sec-
ond change was even more revolutionary: the addition of a separate con-
denser. Newcomen’s steam engine involved heating and then cooling the
boiler to create the alternation of hot and cold temperatures to create and
James Watt’s Steam Engine, c. 1776
Source: Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:Maquina vapor Watt ETSIIM.jpg,”
Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index
.php?title=File:Maquina_vapor_Watt_ETSIIM.jpg&oldid=362051513
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133
condense steam. This wasted a tremendous amount of heat energy, mean-
ing that Newcomen’s engine required a tremendous amount of coal, at
high expense, to operate. By introducing a condenser separate from the
boiler, Watt made the steam engine vastly more efficient, and hence much
more economical. He turned the steam engine from a high-cost device for
pumping water from mines to a low-cost device that could be deployed
in literally thousands of uses in the future. The world economy was trans-
formed by that single insight.
From the Organic Economy to the Energy-Rich Economy
With the invention of the steam engine, Britain entered the Industrial Age.
From 1700 to 1820, British output per person rose 0.26 percent per year.
During 1820–1850, the growth rate increased to 1.04 percent per year; dur-
ing 1850–1900, it increased again to 1.32 percent per year. The time period
needed to double output per person fell from 270 years at the growth rate
of the period 1700–1820 to sixty-seven years at the growth rate during
1820–1850 to just fifty-three years at the growth rate during 1850–1900.3
The British economic historian E. A. Wrigley has characterized the
breakthrough as the transition from the “organic economy” to the “energy-
rich economy.”4 By organic economy, Wrigley means an economy in which
“all industrial production depended on vegetable or animal raw materi-
als.” The energy used in the production of raw materials and the industrial
transformation of those materials into final products came overwhelm-
ingly from human labor and draft animals, types of organic inputs. Wind-
mills and waterwheels provided some energy, but only a small fraction of
the organic inputs. Then came coal, the first of the three fossil fuels (coal,
petroleum, and natural gas) that would be deployed on a large scale after
1800. With the liberation from scarce organic-based energy, and ultimately
the foodstuffs and feed grains grown to sustain the human and animal
populations, the economy could take off.
Wrigley’s estimates of energy consumption in England and Wales by
type of input, shown in table 7.2, are highly instructive. Total energy con-
sumption rose by 37 percent in the first half of the eighteenth century, by
124 percent in the second half of the century, and by 255 percent in the
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134
first half of the nineteenth century. Note the high use of coal already in
1700–1709, before the steam engine. Most of this coal was likely used for
home heating and cooking.
Watt’s steam engine had applications across the economy. It was, in
modern parlance, a general-purpose technology (GPT)—the kind of tech-
nology that finds applications across many sectors of the economy.5 With
the steam engine, equipment of all kinds could be mechanized. Major
applications came quickly in textiles production, with the mechanization
of spinning and weaving and the introduction of large-scale factory pro-
duction using steam power. Metallurgy soared as well, with tremendous
advances in steam-powered blast furnaces for steel making. Fundamental
breakthroughs were also quickly achieved in transport, with the steam-
powered railroad, steam-powered river barges, and steam-powered ocean-
going vessels.
As steam power drastically reduced the costs of transport, coal produc-
tion, steel making, textile production, and other industrial processes, new
possibilities soared across the economy. One of the most important cost
reductions came in agriculture. With steam-powered ocean shipping, it
became economical to ship organic fertilizers from South America, namely,
Table
1700–1709 1750–1759
Draught animals 32.8 33.6 34.3 50.1
Population 27.3 29.7 41.8 67.8
Firewood 22.5 22.6 18.5 2.2
Wind 1.4 2.8 12.7 24.4
Water 1.0 1.3 1.1 1.7
Coal 84.0 140.8 408.7 1689.1
Total 168.9 230.9 517.1 1835.5
Coal as % of total 49.7 61.0 79.0 92.0
Source: E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 27,
table 2.1.
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135
the nitrate deposits from bird and bat guano off the coasts of Peru and
Chile. Railroads allowed the commercial opening of new agricultural
regions, such as the Argentine Pampas, with much of the new produc-
tion destined for transoceanic exports. During the nineteenth century, the
world’s capacity to grow food soared, bolstered by scientific breakthroughs
in agronomy and the increased mechanization of agriculture.
With increased food production came rising populations. More food
meant more survival and higher fertility rates. The shift from the organic
economy to the energy-rich economy thus enabled a vast increase in the
global population. The world’s population grew from around 600 million
in 1700 to 900 million in 1800 and then to 1.6 billion by 1900. The age-old
constraint on the size of the global population, limited by food production
in the organic economy, was ended.
The unprecedented increases in world population and output per capita
with the advent of the Industrial Age appear vividly in figures 1.1 and 1.3.
The turning point around 1820 is clear enough. The long history of nearly
unchanged output per person ended with the onset of industrialization.
Between 1000 CE and 1820, the world average output per capita increased
at the nearly imperceptible rate of 0.05 percent per annum. During the
period from 1820 to 1900, the growth rate was ten times higher, reach-
ing 0.5 percent per annum. Similarly, the global population, which grew
at a miniscule 0.1 percent per year between 1000 and 1700, accelerated to
0.5 percent per year between 1700 and 1820 and then to 0.6 percent per
annum between 1820 and 1920. The world economy had, in short, made
the breakthrough to modern economic growth, and the global population
soared along with rising incomes.
Why Did Industrialization Start in Britain?
What made Watt’s invention possible? Why did Britain industrialize first
and soar to the lead? Britain certainly was not the only home of scien-
tists. Italy has to have pride of place, I would say, with Leonardo da Vinci
and Galileo as prime movers of the European scientific revolution. One
could cite Poland’s Copernicus early in the sixteenth century as provid-
ing one of the key insights, the heliocentric universe, that got Galileo and
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136
then Newton thinking about a new physics. And one could cite the huge
advances in governance and commerce in Holland as precursors of Brit-
ain’s own commercial revolution. After all, it was the invasion of the Dutch
monarch, William of Orange, in 1688 that gave Britain its Glorious Revo-
lution and the clear path to modern capitalist institutions.
What Britain offered was an extraordinary combination of favorable
conditions that, taken together, made Watt’s invention and its subse-
quent rapid adoption possible. The industrial revolution was not a com-
monplace affair. Several conditions had to align to achieve the takeoff to
self-sustaining industrialization and ongoing economic growth. Britain’s
uniqueness lies in putting all of the necessary pieces together for the first
time. Perhaps the Song Dynasty in China, roughly one millennium ear-
lier, offered similarly propitious circumstances, but lacked the spark to set
industrialization in motion.
The first condition in Britain was the intellectual milieu, in which sci-
ence and empiricism were deeply respected, even revered. It was in Britain
that theologian and philosopher Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century
preached a philosophy of empirical knowledge of nature, and where his
namesake and perhaps distant relation Francis Bacon in the early seven-
teenth century put forward the modern idea of human progress through
science and technology, with science based on the experimental method.
This empirical approach underpinned the new physics that arrived with
Galileo and Isaac Newton in the next century.
As poet Alexander Pope wrote of Newton, “Nature and Nature’s laws
lay hid in night: / God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” Newton
explained the cosmos with his new physics and made possible many of
the scientific breakthroughs that were to come. Newton did his work at
the University of Cambridge, an institution that continues to be a pioneer
in the basic sciences today. Britain’s universities were crucial for industri-
alization. The very fact of an instruments laboratory at Glasgow Univer-
sity where Watt could do his pathbreaking work speaks volumes about
the intellectual basis for technological advances. And Watt was highly
respected for his breakthroughs, winning membership in the Royal Society
of Edinburgh and the French Academy, among other institutions.
The intellectual milieu and support were not sufficient. Italy too had
a glorious scientific tradition and a great university network. Additional
factors were at play in Britain. Another key point is that Watt sought
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137
to develop his technology not only as a technological concept but also
as a business venture. He aimed to make money, and indeed succeeded
in doing so. Britain offered an environment where market institutions
were well developed and where the ownership of intellectual property in
the form of patent rights had long existed. On that basis, Watt was able
to attract private capital, notably from his business partner and leading
manufacturer Richard Boulton. Watt and Boulton needed to defend their
patent rights against infringements by others, and the courts indeed rec-
ognized their claims.
Scientific inquiry, universities, and market institutions were not suffi-
cient either. One might say, indeed, that Holland had arrived at that com-
bination before Britain. But Britain had something that Holland lacked:
coal. Easily accessible coal was the key—and not just coal, but a coal indus-
try. Britain had long used coal for home heating and cooking and was
therefore highly experienced in mining, shipping, and marketing coal. This
was an extraordinary advantage. An economist, speaking in hypotheticals,
might claim, “Well, if it wasn’t coal, it would have been something else,
perhaps oil or gas.” But coal had to come first in order to make the other
fossil fuels possible. The far more complex internal combustion engine
and gas turbine both built on the steam engine, and neither could have
emerged without the decades of advances in mining, metallurgy, machine-
making, and engine technologies made possible first with the coal-based
steam engine.
Yet even empiricism and a scientific outlook, the universities and mar-
ket institutions, and the accessibility of and experience with coal are still
not the full story. The steam engine proved so profitable because Britain
was part of a global trading system, backed by multinational companies
(exemplified by the East India Company) that could transport commodi-
ties such as cotton for processing into textiles in Britain’s new steam-driven
factories. In other words, Watt had an enormous potential market, not just
an idea and access to a patent and to coal.
Self-sustaining industrialization took off just once in human history, in
Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. All other indus-
trialization since then are descendants of the technologies, corporate laws,
and financial mechanisms of Britain’s breakthrough. Before Britain’s indus-
trial revolution, other places had developed industry—textiles, iron-making,
machinery—but none had broken free of the organic economy. Perhaps
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138
China in the Song Dynasty or the Ming Dynasty was the best placed to
do so before Britain. China, too, had markets, trade, scientific and techno-
logical knowledge, and coal, albeit less accessible coal. There is perhaps no
fundamental reason why Britain beat China to industrialization. Human
history, like natural evolution, is subject to accidents and randomness.
A useful analogy, perhaps, is the beginning of life itself on Earth. Sci-
entists suspect that life emerged from a unique confluence of circum-
stances: organic materials (notably self-replicating RNA), an energy source
(perhaps the thermal vents in the deep ocean), and the self-organizing
properties of the components of a first living cell (such as a lipid membrane
and a self-replicating strand of RNA). Somehow the pieces of the puzzle
self-assembled. It must not have been a likely process. Since all of life today
apparently shares a common ancestry with the same DNA chemistry, the
emergence of self-replicating life may have occurred just once.
The same seems to be true about self-sustaining economic growth.
Several conditions were needed simultaneously in Britain to set off the
Industrial Revolution. And all subsequent industrialization, in the U.S.,
Western Europe, Russia, Japan, China, and now Africa, can trace their own
industrial lineage to a single common ancestor: Watt and his steam engine
in Glasgow in 1776.
Endogenous Growth and Kondratiev Waves
The steam engine was so decisive, unleashing advances in factory produc-
tion, precision manufacturing, and countless applications of the new steam
power, that it set off a chain reaction of further discoveries. Professor Mar-
tin Weitzman of Harvard University noted that innovations can be built
upon current technologies through the “hybridization of ideas”—that is,
by combining existing technologies into new patterns that in turn can be
combined into still more innovative designs.6
Let me offer a very simple illustration based on his thoughts. Suppose
that there are ten distinct technologies. There are then forty-five two-way
combinations of the ten technologies (1/2 × 10 × 9). Suppose that 20 percent
of those pairwise combinations yield a useful new technology. We would
have nine additional technologies. The nine new technologies could then
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139
hybridize (combine) with each other or with the original technologies,
to produce yet more innovations. Weizmann called this ongoing process
“recombinant growth.”
The basic idea is that innovations beget innovations. We can view this
dynamic from a related perspective, the opportunity to make profits. Sup-
pose that each technological breakthrough causes the economy to grow.
To stay with simple numbers, suppose that each fundamental technological
breakthrough doubles the size of the economy. If we set Britain’s GDP to
100 units before Watt, then we might say the steam engine raised GDP to
200. With a larger GDP, the incentive to invent is also greater. Each inven-
tion is likely to earn more revenues and thereby cover the costs of R&D
and the early implementation of new ideas. With GDP equal to 200, more
potential Watt-like inventions are explored, and eventually another one is
developed that boosts the GDP to 400, causing still more R&D and fur-
ther innovation. Economists label this self-sustaining process (innovation
larger market size innovation larger market size) as “endogenous
growth.” The economist Paul Romer provided a rigorous mathematical
account of endogenous growth in the 1980s and received the Nobel Prize in
Economics for his achievement.
The steam engine and the breakthrough to an energy-rich economy set
off such a process of endogenous growth that it has so far lasted for more
than two centuries. Global GDP per capita, which hardly budged for cen-
turies before the age of industrialization, has been rising rapidly and fairly
consistently since 1820. The fuel for that long-term growth has been a con-
tinuing wave of technological advances, many building on previous tech-
nologies through hybridization and others introducing fundamentally new
ideas and approaches.
These waves of technology are often bundled into distinct phases, much
like bundling the ages of globalization. The earliest theory of technology
waves came from the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev, writing in
the 1920s. He identified major waves of technology arriving roughly every
fifty to sixty years. Each wave generates a new era of business investments
that boost the economy and continues the path of economic growth. One
rendition of such “Kondratiev waves” is shown in figure 7.2, due to Wile-
nius and Kurki.7 In this depiction, the steam engine gives rise to the first
wave, 1780–1830. This is followed by a second wave of investments in rail-
ways and steel, 1830–1880, both depending on the steam engine, as well as
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141
other new technologies. The third wave is the era of electrification (build-
ing on Faraday’s discoveries of electromagnetic induction) and modern
chemistry, 1880–1930. The fourth wave builds on the automobile (and the
internal combustion engine) and petrochemicals, the age of oil, one might
say, 1930–1970. This is followed by a fifth wave, based on information and
communications technologies (ICTs), to around 2010. Finally, Wilenius
and Kurki identify a sixth wave of “intelligent technologies,” including
robotics and artificial intelligence, for the years 2010–2050. The columns
in red measure the ten-year annual return on equities using the S&P 500.
The argument is that each technological wave gives rise to an increase in
stock market prices, signaling future profitability and incentive to invest.
At the end of the technology cycle, the returns fall back to zero, awaiting a
new technological innovation to set off the next investment cycle. Another
recent usage identifies four rather than six stages of industrialization:
(1) water and steam power; (2) electricity and the internal combustion
engine; (3) information and communications technologies; and (4) the
fusion of technologies, combining ICTs, biological technologies such as
genomics, and new materials (e.g., nanotechnologies).8
The Diffusion of Industrialization in Europe
British industrialization started in the mid-1700s with Newcomen’s steam
engine and other innovations in textiles and metallurgy. Yet full-fledged
industrialization only took off with the end of the Napoleonic Wars. As
of 1820, Britain and Holland were in the lead of Europe in per capita
GDP (measured at a consistent set of international prices, according to
data developed by historian Angus Maddison), but the gap was modest.
Table 7.3 summarizes the story over the nineteenth century. Each country’s
income per person is shown relative to Britain’s, which is given an index
value of 100. A value of 70, therefore, signifies a per capita income that is
70 percent of Britain’s. As of 1820, Britain led the rest of Europe, with the
exception of the Netherlands, which stood at 108. Between 1820 and 1850,
Britain and countries close to Britain (such as France and the Netherlands)
generally grew more rapidly than countries more distant from Britain
(such as Spain, Italy, Greece, and Finland). By 1900, there was a rather clear
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142
distance gradient. On average, the closer a country was to Britain (mea-
sured as direct distance between national capitals), the higher was its per
capita income in 1900.
What we are observing is a geographical diffusion process. Industrial-
ization started in Britain and then gradually over time moved to the rest
of Europe, with those regions farthest away generally industrializing at a
later date. It’s a bit like dropping a stone in water. The ripples go outward in
concentric circles, so the impact is felt earliest near where the stone hits the
water and only later at greater distances.
What is the reason for this gradual diffusion? Remember that Britain’s
industrialization had several foundations, including a market for industrial
products, access to coal, access to transport, industrial skills, and techno-
logical know-how. These were the prerequisites as well for the later arrivals
to industrialization. They needed a market for their output. Britain often
Table
1900
United Kingdom 100 100 100 100
France 67 69 59 64
Netherlands 108 102 86 76
Spain 59 46 38 40
Western Europe 70 67 61 64
China 35 26 17 12
India 31 23 17 13
Japan 39 29 23 26
United States 74 77 77 91
Africa 25 – 16 13
Latin America 41 – 21 25
Source: Angus Maddison. “Statistics on World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1-2008 AD.”
Historical Statistics 3 (2010): 1–36.
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143
provided that market. They needed access to coal, which might come from
their own mines or from shipments from Britain or other mining sites. They
needed transport, which tended to be higher in cost over land routes in
Central and Eastern Europe than the sea routes of coastal economies. And
they needed industrial skills (beginning with literacy and numeracy) and
technological know-how. For every one of these prerequisites, proximity to
Britain, the home of big industry, was helpful. The result was a spreading
wave of industrialization, starting with Britain’s near neighbors, including
Belgium, the Netherlands, and France in the years 1820–1850, extending to
more distant countries (Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, Spain) in the second
half of the century, and finally reaching Eastern Europe and Russia late in
the nineteenth century.
Of course, national specificities mattered as well. Some countries had
coal; others did not. A country like Switzerland could tap into hydroelectric
power once the technology became known. Some had national markets from
the start (France, the Netherlands) while others (Italy, Germany) were not
yet unified nations until around 1870. And some parts of Europe, particularly
in Eastern Europe, still had pre-capitalist institutions of serfdom that had to
be eliminated before market-based industrialization could get underway. Yet
for all these countries, Britain set the pace and served as the role model. It
provided the technologies, financial capital, know-how, and marketplace to
boost the incomes of the laggard nations.
The Great Global Divergence
The age of industrial globalization dramatically increased the gap between
the North Atlantic—Western Europe and the United States—and the rest
of the world in terms of incomes, industrial production, and military power.
Since 1500, Western Europe had made important advances on many fronts,
including military power, global conquests, scale of industry, and mul-
tinational production and trade in many sectors, including cotton, sugar,
tobacco, and others. By 1820, according to Maddison’s estimates, a signifi-
cant 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
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144
Europe’s average of around $1,200 and Britain’s global lead at around $1,700.
With the industrialization that followed, that gap widened dramatically in
the nineteenth century.
Figure 7.3 summarizes the dramatic story by comparing the two most
dynamic industrializing nations—the United Kingdom and the United
States—with several other world regions. We see three groups of outcomes.
The UK and the United States held the global lead, with soaring econ-
omies that reached a per capita income of roughly $5,000 by 1913. Latin
America and Japan constituted a middle group, with much more limited
economic growth beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century
and incomes rising to around $1,400 by 1913. The laggard group included
Africa, China, and India, which experienced essentially no rise in output
per person, each with a GDP per capita of around $600 in 1913. Thus, by
1913, the two leading nations had roughly eight times the per capita income
of Africa, China, and India! The United States alone, with around 100 mil-
lion inhabitants, has greater production than China and India combined,
with roughly 750 million inhabitants.
The story of the great divergence between Europe and Asia is the great
drama of the nineteenth-century world economy. This is the period when
the world fell into the hands of the North Atlantic powers, first Britain and
6,000 Pe
r C ap
it a
G D
P (1
99 0
In te
rn at
io n
al G
ea ry
-K h
am is
d o
lla rs
) 5,000
4,000
3,000
2,000
1,000
18 20
18 23
18 26
18 29
18 32
18 35
18 38
18 41
18 44
18 47
18 50
18 53
18 56
18 59
18 62
18 65
18 68
18 71
18 74
18 77
18 80
18 83
18 86
18 89
18 92
18 95
18 98
19 01
19 04
19 07
19 10
19 13
0
Africa China India Japan
Latin America United States United Kingdom
Economic Divergence of Major Countries and Regions, 1820–1913
Source: Angus Maddison. “Statistics on World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP,
1–2008 AD.” Historical Statistics 3 (2010): 1–36.
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145
the other European empires, and then in the twentieth century the United
States, especially after World War II. Only with the rapid growth of China
and India toward the end of the twentieth century would Asia begin to
narrow the huge gaps in relative income and power that opened in the
nineteenth century.
One of the factors in determining the global patterns of industrializa-
tion was the presence or absence of coal, and then in the twentieth century,
the presence or absence of petroleum and natural gas. Places close to coal
deposits tended to industrialize earlier, while regions far from coal tended
to industrialize much later. As seen in figure 7.4, the world regions that
are best endowed with coal include Western Europe, the United States,
Australia, Russia, China, India, Indonesia, South Africa, the Andes, and
southeastern Brazil, while most of tropical Africa and much of tropical
America are bereft of coal deposits. The first phase of coal-based industrial-
ization began in Western Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century,
following Britain’s early lead. Coal mining and coal-based industrializa-
tion followed some decades later in the United States, Australia, Japan, and
Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century, and eventually spread
Major Geological Deposits of Coal, 2017
Source: “World Coal Deposits Map,” mapsofworld.com. Reproduced with permission.
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146
to other coal regions in the twentieth century. In the twentieth century, fol-
lowing the inventions of the internal combustion engine and the gas tur-
bine, the presence of hydrocarbons became advantageous not only for oil
and gas production but also for the development of petrochemical indus-
tries and other energy-intensive sectors.
The Asian Drama: China, India, and Japan
The story of Asia in the face of European and U.S. industrialization is vital
to understand because it made the world that we inherited, one that is now
being rapidly reordered. China, a proud empire with an astounding 37 per-
cent of the world’s population in 1820, found itself humbled by countries
less than a tenth its size. While China avoided direct colonization during
the nineteenth century, it did not avoid chaos, military defeat, or European
imperial encroachments on its sovereignty. India, with 20 percent of the
world’s population, fared even worse. From the mid-1700s onward, India was
absorbed step by step by the East India Company, and in 1858, it fell entirely
into the clutches of the British Empire, which formally took over the job of
colonial rule from the East India Company. Japan was the relative success
story in Asia, not only preserving its sovereignty but successfully embarking
on a path of industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century, albeit at
an income level far below that of Europe. By dint of its industrialization,
Japan became Asia’s military powerhouse from the end of the nineteenth
century until Japan’s defeat in World War II. Accounting for these distinc-
tive pathways is one of the great tasks of economic and political history.
China’s nineteenth-century story actually begins in 1793, when the
Chinese emperor rebuffed a British mission that sought to open British-
Chinese trade. The Qing emperor could see no advantage in the request
and sent the mission home without result. Another such mission failed in
1816. When Britain next returned, it did so with a vengeance, launching
the infamous Opium Wars with China in 1839. This time Britain would
not accept no for an answer. China would be forced to open to British
trade—not just normal trade, but also opium from India peddled by British
merchants. When the Chinese authorities refused and tried to confiscate
the opium brought into Chinese waters, the British responded with war.
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147
A British expeditionary force launched several assaults on coastal cities
and ports, culminating in the Nanjing Treaty of 1842, which opened four
ports, including Shanghai, to trade and transferred Hong Kong Island to
Britain “in perpetuity.” When Britain increased its demands in the 1850s,
the Second Opium War (1856–60) broke out; this time, Anglo-French
forces entered Beijing and burned the Summer Palace.
The incursion of the European imperialists put China into an economic
tailspin from which it would not recover for more than a century. With the
Qing Dynasty humiliated and weakened by the losses of the First Opium
War, an internal rebellion broke out between 1850 and 1864. Known as the
Taiping Rebellion, it pitted the Qing Dynasty against the followers of a self-
declared brother of Jesus. The rebellion eventually turned into a total war with
the staggering death toll of many tens of millions of people. China would try
to recover from the mass bloodletting and adopted reforms in the later part
of the nineteenth century as part of a “self-strengthening movement” to resist
the Europeans, but the Qing Dynasty was never able to formulate a coher-
ent reform program nor to resist the ever-growing demands of the European
imperialists. Yet another rebellion broke out in 1899 against concessions to
the Europeans, and this so-called Boxer Rebellion led once more to a mas-
sive show of force by the European powers. The Boxer Treaty, imposed by
the European powers in 1901, allowed the foreign powers to station troops in
Beijing and called on Beijing to pay reparations to the Europeans.
The authority of the Qing Dynasty finally collapsed in 1912, and Sun Yat-
Sen declared the Republic of China, but once again the chance for order,
reform, and economic development gave way to internal disorder within a
few years. The Chinese state fragmented, and warlords competed for ter-
ritory and power. In 1927, the Nationalist government launched attacks on
the Chinese Communist Party, igniting a civil war that would last until
1949. Japan invaded China in 1931, brutally occupying parts of China until
Japan’s defeat in 1945 at the end of the Second World War. The Communist
forces under Mao Zedong defeated the Nationalist forces under Chiang
Kai-shek in 1949 and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China.
Even then, China’s turmoil did not end. The new state embarked on
a Soviet-style centrally planned economy in the 1950s, but Mao became
impatient with the results by the end of the 1950s and launched the Great
Leap Forward to accelerate industrialization. The result was chaos and
starvation, as farmers were required to leave the fields and devote their
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148
meager resources and physical labor to Mao’s illusion of building a nation
with backyard steel mills. As many as 45 million people may have starved.
Yet Mao was not finished with upheaval, as he then launched the Cultural
Revolution, which created another decade of chaos from 1966 to his death
in 1976. Only in 1978—130 years after the First Opium War—did China
finally embark on market-based economic reforms and transformation. By
then, China was an impoverished rural economy with a per capita income
well below one-tenth of Western Europe’s.
India’s saga is also one of long-term decline. In the seventeenth cen-
tury, India was a unified state under Mughal rule. It was home to around
one-fourth of the world’s population and produced roughly one-fourth
of the world’s output. India was by far the largest manufacturing nation
in the world, with textiles widely admired and sought after by European
consumers. Yet from that lofty position, India, like China, experienced a
catastrophic and continuous decline in per capita income relative to the
industrial nations and in India’s share of the world economy until the
beginnings of recovery in the second half of the twentieth century.
India’s decline began with multiple challenges to Mughal rule in the
late seventeenth century. In western India, Mughal rule was challenged
by several powers, including Persia, a Sikh confederacy in the Punjab, and
the rising Maratha Empire in the Deccan Plateau. The Maratha defeated
the Mughals in several wars and extended their control over much of
India. In Bengal, to the east, the British East India Company, with its
own private army, defeated the ruling state in the Battle of Plassey in 1757,
which gave the company effective control and tax authority over Ben-
gal. The company also successfully defeated France in battles along the
southeastern coast as part of the global Seven Years’ War. Mughal rule was
effectively at an end.
From the Battle of Plassey to the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the British
East India Company fought countless wars of conquest, including three
wars with the Maratha Empire between 1775 and 1818, to take control over
all of India. British rule was harsh and profoundly disruptive, marked by
famines and administrative ruthlessness that contributed to the deaths of
millions. The gaudy corruption of company officials led the British govern-
ment to assert partial control over company affairs and policies toward the
end of the eighteenth century, so that British rule in India in the first half
of the 1800s was under the mixed authority of the company and the Crown.
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149
In 1857, an Indian rebellion against British rule was decisively defeated, and
the British government took over direct control of India, creating the British
Raj that was to rule India until its independence from colonial rule in 1947.
British economic policies decisively weakened the economy and society.
As told vividly by historian Prasannan Parthasarathi, trade protectionism by
Britain throughout the eighteenth century kept India’s famed textiles out
of the British market, eventually driving millions of spinners and weavers
to penury in the nineteenth century. Far from a victory of the free market,
Britain defeated the Indian textile industry in the eighteenth century through
a series of measures including progressively tighter bans on imports of Indian
textiles. Parthasarathi summarizes the sequence of policies as follows:
From the late seventeenth century, British cotton manufacturing expanded
in tandem with state policies of protection. The ban on imports of Indian
painted and printed cloth in 1700 gave a great boost to a British cloth-
printing industry, which was given the exclusive right to supply the home
market. The ban on imports of Indian white calico in 1721 led British
manufacturers to search for and develop a locally made substitute for what
had formerly been imported from the sub-continent. This search was suc-
cessful in the 1770s with the invention of Arkwright’s water frame and
then Crompton’s mule. But the era of protection was not over. Tariffs on
Indian muslin imports in the 1780s helped British muslin manufacturers
to expand and improve their manufacturing capabilities. Trade policies
were integral to the development of the British cotton industry.9
From 1858 until India’s independence, British policy aimed to turn India
into a supplier of raw materials for the British market rather than a com-
petitor of British industry producing finished textiles. Britain ruthlessly
governed the countryside, standing idle in the face of multiple famines
that reflected the combination of nature and Britain’s neglect of Indian
lives. Basic services of health, education, and food relief were shirked,
leaving a vast population of impoverished and largely illiterate peasants.
While there were pockets of industrialization, such as in steel, in the first
half of the twentieth century, India’s industrialization and development
had to await its political independence. Around the time of independence,
India’s illiteracy rate stood at 80-85 percent, and its life expectancy during
1950-55 average 37 years.10
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150
Industrialization occurred in only one place in Asia in the nineteenth
century: Japan. Japan alone was able to avoid subjugation to European rule
and to undertake internal reform measures to propel an early industrial-
ization. Japan’s success reflected a combination of its history, geography,
and effective reforms in the face of imperialist threats from Europe and
the United States. Japan’s early modern history can be dated to 1603, when
one clan ruler, Tokugawa Ieyasu, was able to unite Japan under his feudal
rule. The Tokugawa Shogunate ruled from 1603 until 1868. The shogun, or
military ruler, governed from Edo (today’s Tokyo), while the emperor ruled
symbolically in Kyoto. In 1635, Japan sharply curtailed international con-
tacts and trade to stop the rising influence of Christianity and Western
powers on Japanese politics and society. Trade was limited to a few ports
and to inbound ships only from China, Korea, and the Netherlands.
The Tokugawa era was a period of internal peace and extraordinary
development of culture, basic education, agricultural intensification, urban-
ization, and proto-industry, albeit highly labor-intensive industry. Accord-
ing to Maddison’s estimates, Japan’s population rose from 18.5 million
in 1600 to 34.4 million in 1870. By the late Tokugawa era, an estimated
40–50 percent of men and 15–20 percent of women were literate, a remark-
ably high rate for the time. As early as 1750, Edo (Tokyo) had a popula-
tion of some 1.2 million, and four other cities (Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya, and
Kanazawa) each had populations above one hundred thousand.
The developments that ensued after 1853, when U.S. naval vessels under
Commodore Perry entered Edo Bay, are among the most striking in history.
Perry was demanding trade rights for the United States in the same way
that the European powers had demanded access to the markets of China
and India. Japan, like China and India, faced the decisive threat of Western
imperial rule, but only Japan was able to respond internally with the speed
and coherence that enabled it to keep the outsiders mostly at bay, protect
Japan’s sovereignty, and embark on a period of successful industrialization.
Geography played a role in Japan’s success. As an island archipelago,
Japan was better able to defend itself from invasion. Agricultural produc-
tivity ensured food sufficiency. Locally available coal provided the basis for
early industrialization. And as a densely settled, partially urbanized society,
Japan was able to institute economic, political, and social reforms far more
decisively and effectively than either China or India. By dint of good luck
and good strategy, Japan maintained a united front vis-à-vis the European
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151
and U.S. threats during the second half of the nineteenth century, and by
the early twentieth century had successfully reformed and modernized.
The decisive event occurred in 1868, when a group of clans under the
Tokugawa feudal system successfully revolted in the name of the emperor
against the ruling Tokugawa clan. The Meiji Restoration, as it is known,
sought to respond to the Western challenge by modernizing Japan. The feu-
dal structure was ended and the feudal lands (daimyo) were converted into
prefectures under the control of a new centralized government. The four-
class structure of the feudal society was ended, including elimination of the
warrior (samurai) class. A most remarkable diplomatic initiative, known as
the Iwakura Mission, was launched. Senior Japanese diplomats voyaged
around the world to establish new diplomatic relations with Europe and the
United States and to study best practices abroad as the basis for Japanese
reforms in many key areas, including the structure of government, central
banking, the military, higher education, and industrialization.
The result was a successful transformation, almost entirely peaceful
(save for one short-lived uprising, the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877). The
result might be called a “capitalist revolution” against the feudalism of the
Tokugawa era. Industry began to grow, infrastructure was established, for-
eign experts brought to Japan the new machine technologies, imperial uni-
versities were created, and by the 1890s, Japan had become Asia’s industrial
powerhouse. Between 1870 and 1890, Japan’s GDP per capita grew at an
annual rate of 1.6 percent. The results in terms of military strength were
demonstrated by Japan’s defeat of China in the First Sino-Japanese War
of 1894–95, which established Japan’s imperial control over Taiwan. Japan
next defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 and estab-
lished imperial rule over Korea in 1905. While Japan still lagged far behind
Europe and the United States in per capita income, by 1913 Japan’s per cap-
ita income was roughly 2.5 times that of China.
Europe Swallows Africa
Though Africa was the poorest and least industrialized part of the world,
and though Europeans had been enslaving Africans for centuries, Africa
was the last continent to face the full onslaught of European colonial
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152
domination. Until the end of the nineteenth century, Europe’s impe-
rial foothold in Africa consisted of colonies in the north and south of
Africa and a few trading outposts and forts along the coasts of East and
West Africa. The interior of Africa was largely beyond European control
or even knowledge. The most important reason was the biogeography
of disease.
With a tropical climate and countless animal reservoirs of disease,
tropical Africa was home to many fatal and debilitating diseases both for
humans and farm animals, including horses. Falciparum malaria, transmit-
ted by the human-biting mosquito Anopheles gambiae, created a disease
barrier to European conquest. African trypanosomiasis, otherwise known
as sleeping sickness, transmitted by the tsetse fly, struck down horses and
cattle throughout central Africa. It was only with the discovery of a pre-
vention and cure for malaria in particular that Africa fell prey to Europe’s
ravenous imperial competition.
That cure for malaria was discovered in Peru. Indigenous Peruvians
drank a mate, or tea infusion, of the bark of the cinchona tree as a cure
for fever. The British learned of this mate, stole the seeds of the cin-
chona tree, and began to cultivate it in England. The active antimalar-
ial agent in the mate was quinine, a bitter substance with the capacity
to prevent and cure malaria. Even better, quinine could be combined
with gin for the perfect beverage on the colonial veranda. Gin and
tonic not only soothed the European palate but smoothed the way for
Europe’s conquest of the interior of tropical Africa beginning in the
1880s. That and improved guns, including the newly developed machine
gun, enabled the rapid dismemberment and conquest of Africa by the
European powers.11
By the 1880s, European imperialism was highly developed, even
refined. In order to divide up Africa without instigating clashes among
the European powers, the Conference of Berlin in 1885 gathered diplo-
mats to divide up Africa among the competitor empires. Depictions of
the conference show a roundtable of European diplomats, a map of Africa
on the wall, but no Africans in sight. Imperialism was a one-way affair.
By 1913, all of Africa, with the notable exceptions of Ethiopia in the Horn
of Africa and Liberia in the west, was under European imperial control, as
seen in figure 7.5.
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153
Anglo-American Hegemony
By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain was first among the imperial
powers, with Queen Victoria reigning over the British Isles, India, Burma,
Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Malaya, much of Africa (“Cape to Cairo”), New Guinea,
and dozens of islands and smaller possessions around the world. Many of
these served as fueling stations for the Royal Navy, which had unrivaled
dominance over the oceans. The British navy, by far the most powerful
Belgium
European claims in Africa, 1913. Modern-day boundaries, largely a legacy of the colonial era, are shown.
Germany
Spain
France
Britain
Italy
Portugal
Independent
Africa Divided Among European Empires, 1913
Source: Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index
.php?title=File:Colonial_Africa_1913_map.svg&oldid=367487165 (accessed October 27, 2019).
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154
in the world, policed the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean that connected
Britain and India through the Suez Canal (which opened in 1871). Britain
maintained de facto control of Egypt after 1882 in large part to ensure the
sea routes to India. Interestingly, China’s GDP remained the largest in the
world until 1888, when it was finally overtaken by the United States, but
China was impoverished. In 1870, with a population around 358 million,
China’s per capita income was just $530 (Maddison data, 1990 international
prices); the UK, with 31 million people, had a per capita income of $3,100,
roughly six times that of China.12
Britain, of course, also gave rise to the major English-speaking offshoots,
most importantly the United States, as well as Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand. The last three remained subordinate to the British Crown until
the Westminster Act of 1931. The United States soared in economic devel-
opment, overtaking Britain in total GDP around 1872, and in GDP per
person around 1905, according to Maddison’s estimates.
Let’s consider the size of the combined Anglo-American economy
as a share of the world (figure 7.6), adding together the British Empire
and the United States. For this purpose, I define the British Empire to
mean Britain and sixteen colonial possessions for which Maddison pro-
vides estimates of GDP during the nineteenth century. The largest of
the colonial possessions were Ireland until 1922, Canada and Australia
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
Pe rc
en t
o f w
o rl
d t
o ta
l
18 20
20 05
20 00
19 95
19 90
19 85
19 80
19 75
19 70
19 65
19 60
19 55
19 50
19 45
19 40
19 35
19 30
19 25
19 20
19 15
19 10
19 05
19 00
18 95
18 90
18 85
18 80
18 75
18 70
18 65
18 60
18 55
18 50
18 45
18 40
18 35
18 30
18 25
British Empire United Kingdom United States British-American Total
The Rise and Decline of British-American Economic
Dominance, 1820–2008
Source: Angus Maddison. “Statistics on World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP,
1-2008 AD.” Historical Statistics 3 (2010): 1–36.
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155
until 1931, and India until 1947. As of 1820, the British Empire accounted
for around 6 percent of the world’s output. By 1870, by dint of Britain’s
own industrialization and its expanded imperial holdings, the British
Empire accounted for around 23 percent of the world economy, of which
the United Kingdom itself was around 9 percent. The British Empire
remained around 20 percent of the world economy until 1918, then began
to decline with the independence of various colonial possessions, begin-
ning with Ireland in 1922.
During the nineteenth century, the United States became the world’s
largest economy, with the U.S. share of world output rising from 2 per-
cent in 1820 to 9 percent in 1870, 16 percent in 1900, and 19 percent in 1918.
At the end of World War I, therefore, the United States and the British
Empire were about the same size. From that point, the U.S. share contin-
ued to rise, reaching more than 25 percent at the end of World War II,
while the British imperial share continued to decline, falling below 10 per-
cent of the world economy by 1950, following India’s independence in 1947.
If we consider the British-American world combined, this English-speaking
hegemonic duo accounted for around 40 percent of world production as of
1900, and sustained that remarkable share until World War II, after which
India and other British colonies gained their independence. By 1980, the
British Empire was basically gone, and the UK itself accounted for less than
4 percent of world output.
Until World War I, Britain was undoubtedly the conductor of the
Anglo-American orchestra. Britain was an industrial powerhouse, the City
of London was the indisputable financial center of the world, and the
pound sterling reigned supreme over the world’s currencies. The British
navy ruled the seas. As late as 1913, one could hardly imagine a twentieth-
century world in which Britain would not be the dominant power, or at least
a coequal with the United States. Of course, France had its long-standing
empire, and Germany too had acquired imperial possessions in Africa. The
United States was the single biggest country in the world, but a latecomer
to overseas empire building.
On the eve of World War I, the world was linked together by trade,
empire, and the Pax Britannica. Britain can rightly be considered the
world’s first hegemonic power. Though Spain had acquired the first global
empire, it never commanded the oceans as did Britain. In his post–World
War I masterwork, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, John Maynard
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Keynes vividly described this interconnected prewar world from the van-
tage point of London just before the onset of World War I.
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning
tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he
might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep;
he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth
in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world,
and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and
advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with
the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any
continent that fancy or information might recommend. He could secure
forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any
country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch
his servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such supply of the pre-
cious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to
foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or cus-
toms, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself
greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference.13
Yet stunningly, the world soon crashed upon Europe and the British
Empire. As Rome was defeated by the German tribes, the Byzantines by
the Ottomans, the Chinese by the Mongols, and Asia by Europe, so too
Europe experienced a decisive shock as of 1914 that again changed the
world and dethroned Europe’s empires from the apex of global power.
The Thirty-Year European Bloodletting
One must account the thirty-year period from 1914 to 1945 as one of the
greatest disasters ever to afflict humanity. It was Europe’s second Thirty
Years’ War. The first, from 1618 to 1648, was a war within the Holy Roman
Empire, mainly between different branches of Christianity. The second
Thirty Years’ War was a prolonged struggle between the German-speaking
nations, notably Germany and Austria, with the rest of Europe, including
Britain, France, and Russia.
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The war from 1914 to 1945 was a war among the mightiest industrial
powers of the world. And it was a war that had no fundamental purpose.
The world had never been so prosperous for the very countries that ended
up nearly destroying themselves and killing tens of millions of people. At
the core, the two European bloodlettings show the madness of violence
and self-destruction, not wars as means to any rational ends.
The second Thirty Years’ War began with World War I. At the end of
World War I, the Treaty of Versailles was supposed to be the peace to end
all wars. To later historians, it has become known as the peace to end all
peace. The agreements reached in Versailles were so cynical and destabiliz-
ing that Europe failed to recover its economic vitality, and the political,
diplomatic, and economic conflicts within Europe remained intense. The
resulting instability was a major cause of the Great Depression, an eco-
nomic collapse so devastating and destabilizing that it brought to power
the most villainous and heinous regime of modern history, perhaps of all
history: the Nazi regime of Hitler’s Germany. Germany’s aggression, in
turn, led to the Second World War, which devastated much of the world
and lasted until Germany’s defeat in 1945.
We are now more than a full century past the onset of World War I,
yet there is still no real explanation of this war. There is a chronology, to be
sure, but no explanation. The reason is this: World War I was a war without
any real purpose. It was a war that surely could have been avoided.
We know, of course, the basic chronology. In July 1914, the archduke of
the Habsburg Empire was killed by a nineteen year-old separatist, Gavrilo
Princep, in a terrorist act in Sarajevo, a city of the Habsburg Austro-
Hungarian Empire. In response to the attack, Germany prodded the
Habsburg Empire to make impossible demands on Serbia, which was
viewed as the main state harboring anti-Habsburg terrorists. When Serbia
predictably rejected those extreme demands, the Habsburg Empire declared
war. Russia, as a protector of Serbia and a fellow Slavic nation, mobilized to
protect Serbia against the oncoming clash with the Habsburgs. Germany,
antagonistic to Russia and defending Austria, launched the war. This, in
turn, brought in Russia’s allies, Britain and France. Many historians argue
that the German military command actively sought the war as a preemptive
strike against Russia, out of fear that Russia was gaining too much eco-
nomic and military power in the early years of the twentieth century, and
would soon overshadow Germany unless Germany attacked Russia first.
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158
Europe was suddenly engulfed in war, and not just war but the first fully
industrial war, with aerial bombings, machine guns, tanks, and submarines—
the full miracle of industrialization put to the nightmarish destruction of
human beings. Some 20 million people perished in the war.
In the third year of the war, the United States got pulled in as well,
through the coaxing of President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson naively
believed that he would make this “the war to end all wars.” Wilson’s vision
proved to be a failure in practice. With America’s entry into the war,
what might have been a stalemate within Europe, and thereby possibly a
return to long-term peace, ended up as the complete defeat of Germany
by the United States and its allies. With that defeat came the overthrow of
the Prussian monarchy, the overly harsh terms imposed on Germany in the
Versailles peace settlement, and the profound destabilization of Germany
in the 1920s, leading to Hitler’s rise to power in early 1933.
In fact, World War I broke so much pottery you could say that it had
destroyed the basis for a return to normal life not only in Europe but also in
Russia and the Middle East. Western and Central Europe saw the collapse
of the Habsburg and Prussian empires. Russia experienced the overthrow
of the Romanov Empire by the Bolsheviks and the launch of seventy-five
years of brutal Soviet rule. The Ottoman Empire was defeated and disman-
tled, opening the way to new European imperialism in the Middle East
and North Africa led cynically by Britain and France.
The war, in short, achieved nothing except the dislocation of the politi-
cal organization of Europe, the former Ottoman lands, the Middle East,
and Russia. Trade within Europe and the gold standard of prewar Europe
never recovered. Instead, Europe experienced a decade of profound mon-
etary instability in the 1920s followed by economic depression in the 1930s.
John Maynard Keynes, the greatest economist of the twentieth century,
served as a young expert on Britain’s negotiating team at the Versailles
peace conference. He was profoundly disheartened by the narrowness of
the perspective of the major powers and the punitive nature of the settle-
ment imposed on Germany. In a remarkable piece of analysis and protest,
Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace, written at the end of the nego-
tiations in 1919, warned that the harshness of the settlement, and especially
the heavy reparations payments levied on Germany, would lead to eco-
nomic disarray in Europe and the likelihood of another disaster to follow.
His words were stark, and prophetic:
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159
If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, ven-
geance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very
long that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despair-
ing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late Ger-
man war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor,
the civilization and the progress of our generation.14
At the end of January 1933, in the midst of the global Great Depres-
sion and with Germany suffering 25 percent unemployment and unpay-
able foreign debts, the aged German president Hindenburg appointed a
new chancellor, Adolph Hitler. Hitler remilitarized Germany and set out
to conquer the lands to the east, while ridding Germany of its Jews. World
War II broke out on September 1, 1939, with the invasion of Poland by both
Germany and the Soviet Union. The full onslaught of war ensued, includ-
ing the Holocaust of the Jews and others groups. At the same time, Japan’s
fascist regime, an ally of Nazi Germany, waged war on the United States
and throughout Asia. The world was in flames.
In one of the most notable statements of modern history, the remarkable
UK prime minister Winston Churchill called for the New World, “with all
its power and might,” to step forth “to the rescue and the liberation of the
old.” Franklin Roosevelt, arguably the greatest president in American his-
tory, heeded that call. The industrial power of the United States came to
the rescue. While the Soviet Union was fighting and suffering millions of
deaths on the battlefield, America’s industrial might soared and provided
the munitions for victory. By the end of the war, the United States was
by far the world’s dominant economy. America was spared any attacks on
the homeland after the one-day attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base in
Hawaii on December 7, 1941. The industrial sector thrived, growing some
60 percent between 1940 and 1945. As of 1950, the United States accounted
for around 27 percent of global output.
The American Century
We have arrived at the moment of America’s global hegemonic leadership.
In 1941, the publisher of Time magazine, Henry Luce, declared the
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160
American Century. He correctly intuited that when the war ended, Amer-
ica would be the world’s dominant economic, technological, and geopoliti-
cal power. Not only did the United States possess by far the world’s largest
economy, but that economy had benefited from, and would continue to
benefit from, the massive advances in technology developed in the course
of the war. The wartime effort contributed to fundamental technological
advances in many sectors: aviation, computers, cybernetics (human-machine
interactions), public health, electronics (including semiconductors), radar,
communications, and of course nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Just as
important, the experience of the war contributed to the idea of science-led
economic growth. In 1944, Roosevelt asked his science adviser Vannevar
Bush for a plan to transfer the wartime advances in technology to peace-
time use. Bush’s 1945 response, Science: The Endless Frontier, brilliantly laid
out a strategy for mobilizing science for social and economic development.
The pace and scale of America’s economic rise from the early nineteenth
century to Luce’s declaration of the American Century were unprecedented
in economic history to that point. Total output rose from $12.5 billion in
1820 to $929 billion in 1940, a rate of 3.7 percent per annum (in interna-
tional 1990 dollars). The population rose from 10 million in 1820 to 133 mil-
lion in 1940, an annual increase of 2.2 percent, while output per person rose
from $1,257 to $7,000, an annual increase of 1.4 percent. Most importantly,
the United States became a continental-scale industrial power, the only one
on the planet. (The Soviet Union tried to emulate the industrial scale of
the United States, but consistently lagged far behind.). In 1820, there were
twenty-three states, all but one (Louisiana) east of the Mississippi River.
By 1940, there were forty-eight states linked coast to coast by a rail net-
work, which spanned the continent after 1869, and by enormous enterprises
that also operated at the continental scale. The continent was fabulously
rich in natural resources: vast midwestern plains with fertile soils, minerals,
coal and oil, timber, navigable rivers and waterways, and a mostly temper-
ate climate. The European settlers and their descendants were prepared to
take any steps to clear the way for settlements, profits, and industry, includ-
ing mass slavery until the Civil War, the war with Mexico in 1846–48, and
the genocidal wars against the Native American populations throughout
the nineteenth century. Protected by two oceans, the United States built
its industry during two world wars while other industrial nations suffered
horrendous losses of productive capital.
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161
U.S. dynamism was exemplified from the start by infrastructure
development—the building of canals, railroads, and roads—and by the
rapid uptake and development of new technologies, including the frequent
stealing and copying of superior British technologies. In the first half of
the nineteenth century, American inventors improved the steam engine,
modified the railroad, improved the cotton gin, developed the steamboat,
invented the telegraph, and much more. Up until the Civil War of 1861–65,
the U.S. economy as a whole remained mostly rural and agricultural, and
based heavily on slave labor in Southern cotton production. The United
States was around 20 percent urban as of 1860. Following the Civil War,
industrialization soared; by 1910, the country was 46 percent urban, reaching
57 percent by 1940. U.S. GDP surpassed that of the UK in 1872 and China
in 1898, and U.S. per capita income overtook that of the UK around 1905.
The United States used its post–World War II geopolitical leadership
and economic weight to establish a set of institutions to help govern
the postwar order. Most consequential was the new United Nations,
established in 1945 as a bulwark for peace and economic development,
a successor to the failed League of Nations that had been created after
World War I. Two new economic institutions, the International Mon-
etary Fund and the World Bank (formally called the International Bank
for Reconstruction and Development), were established under the UN
umbrella to foster financial stability and to finance postwar reconstruc-
tion and development. A new set of trade rules, the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), aimed to reestablish market-based trade
after its collapse during the Great Depression and World War II. Other
institutions, such as the Food and Agricultural Organization (1945) and
the World Health Organization (1948), were added to the “UN family”
to help provide critical global public goods such as food security and
disease control.
While the United States stood unequaled in economic might and tech-
nological prowess, it faced security challenges, most importantly the strug-
gle with the Soviet Union over the postwar order. The Soviet economy was
only a small fraction of America’s, perhaps around one-third, but the Soviet
Union was a vast country, with nuclear weapons after 1949, an enormous
army in Central Europe, and a commitment to one-party state socialism
and central planning. The two countries faced off in Europe, almost com-
ing to blows several times over the future of Germany, and also competed
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162
internationally for allies, resources, and military advantage. Worst of all, the
two countries launched into a massive nuclear arms race, amassing enough
nuclear armaments to destroy all human life on the planet many times over.
By dint of various accidents, missteps, and misunderstandings, the two
countries came to the brink of global nuclear annihilation in October 1962,
and at least close to the brink on several other occasions.
The U.S. geopolitical leadership has shown two faces to the world. One
was the U.S. interest in building law-based multilateral institutions, includ-
ing the global institutions of the UN system and regional institutions such
as the European Community (and later European Union), of which the
United States was a champion from the start. The other was the cynical
exercise of power for narrow U.S. interests. While the United States did
not directly colonize countries after World War II, it used its vast mili-
tary power and economic leverage repeatedly and often brutally to put into
power governments that would favor U.S. business and security interests
and to remove from power governments that opposed U.S. prerogatives.
“Regime change” operations, meaning U.S.-led invasions, coups, and sub-
terfuges to bring down foreign governments that U.S. officials deemed hos-
tile to U.S. interests, became a mainstay of U.S. foreign policy. In the 1960s,
the United States fought wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos aimed at
installing noncommunist governments. In the 1960s and 1970s, the United
States supported military coups throughout Latin America to bring down
democracies deemed by U.S. strategists to be too far to the left. In the 1980s,
the United States funded wars against left-wing governments in Central
America and the Caribbean. From the 1990s to the 2010s, it fought several
wars in Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa against Russian
allies or other governments it disfavored (e.g., Iraq, Syria and Libya).
Most remarkably, the United States created a network of military instal-
lations and bases around the world that was in scale unrivaled in history.
It is estimated that the United States has military bases in around seventy
countries and military personnel in well over 100 countries. Because of the
secrecy in which they are shrouded, the precise number of U.S. overseas
bases is not known, but expert sleuthing by scholar David Vine and investi-
gative reporter Nick Turse has been a huge help in uncovering the remark-
able extent of the bases.14 Data compiled by the Defense Manpower Data
Center list more than sixty countries worldwide with twenty or more active
duty U.S. military personnel as of March 2019, as shown in figure 7.7.16
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163
Decolonization and the Onset of Global Convergence
World War II sounded the death knell of European empires. A process of
European colonization that began in the early 1500s rapidly unraveled after
1945. The European powers were exhausted by war, heavily indebted, and
without the legitimacy in the colonies to maintain their rule. Local inde-
pendence movements either convinced the imperial power to withdraw
peacefully, as in India in 1947, or eventually forced that outcome through
wars of liberation, as in Indonesia, Algeria, Vietnam, Angola, and else-
where. As newly independent countries joined the world stage, UN mem-
bership rose rapidly. An initial UN membership of fifty-one at its founding
in 1945 rose to 117 by 1965, 159 by 1985, and 193 by 2015.
The end of the colonial era led to a fundamental change in the process
of industrialization. Suddenly, independent countries could pursue their
own destinies, promoting industrialization rather than serving merely as
a source of primary commodities for the imperial nations. Moreover, and
crucially, they could invest in their own people by introducing programs
of mass literacy, public schooling, and public health. While poor countries
were constrained by meager budgets in pursuing their ambitions to scale up
Countries with Active Duty U.S. Military Personnel (20 or more)
Source: Map created using data from: Defense Manpower Data Center, “DoD Personnel,
Workforce Reports & Publications,” DMDC.osd.mil: USA.gov, 2019.
Countries with Active Duty U.S. Military Personnel (20 or more)
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164
education and health care, the intentions were clear. The newly indepen-
dent countries around the world wanted to make up for lost time, by build-
ing the human capital and infrastructure needed to create new industries
and to attract domestic and multinational capital.
They had a lot of catching up to do. The European imperial powers had
left most of their African and Asian colonies in a desperate condition of
very high illiteracy and dreadfully low life expectancy. Table 7.4 shows the
conditions of selected countries in 1950: three industrialized countries and
three countries long under colonial rule (Kenya and India, UK; Indonesia,
the Netherlands). As of 1950, illiteracy had been almost eliminated in the
high-income countries and life expectancy was around sixty-eight years,
but in the long-time colonies, illiteracy was around 80 percent and life
expectancy was around forty years.
By and large, with decolonization the development process began to
work, though unevenly. Newly independent countries that opened to global
trade and investment, maintained peace, and carried out public investments
in health, education, and infrastructure were able to begin a process of con-
vergent growth, that is, growth per capita faster than in the high-income
countries. Illiteracy fell sharply and life expectancy rose as education and
health care were scaled up. By 2000, illiteracy fell to 18 percent in Kenya
Table
United Kingdom 1–2 69.4
United States 3–4 68.7
France 3–4 67.1
Kenya 75–80 42.3
Indonesia 80–85 43.5
India 80–85 36.6
Source: UNESCO, World Illiteracy at Mid-Century: A Statistical Study (Paris: UNESCO, 1957), https://unesdoc
.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000002930; World Population Prospects: The 2019 Revision | United Nations
Population Division, http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=PopDiv&f=variableID%3A68#PopDiv.
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165
and just 10 percent in Indonesia. Life expectancy rose to fifty-three years in
Kenya, sixty-three years in India, and sixty-six years in Indonesia—still far
behind the rich countries, but with a smaller gap.
The greatest development success stories by far were in East Asia, where
the “four tigers” of early postwar industrialization—Hong Kong, South
Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan—achieved spectacular growth rates and dra-
matic declines of poverty. China followed a generation later, with a takeoff
to industrialization and rapid growth beginning in 1978. India began an era
of rapid growth even later, in 1991, after shaking off lackluster economic
development strategies of the early decades of independence.
One of the ramifications of convergent growth is that overall global
growth accelerated after World War II. In the first half of the twentieth
century, worldwide growth, according to Maddison’s estimates, amounted
to around 2 percent per year. In the second half of the twentieth century,
from 1950 to 2000, aggregate global growth was on the order of 4.6 percent
per year, more than doubling the rate of the first half-century.
Broadly speaking, the world shifted from a long era of divergence, in
which the early industrializers—Europe, the United States, Canada, Aus-
tralia, Japan, and a few others—pulled ahead of the rest of the world, to an
era of convergence, in which the laggard countries, notably in Asia but also
in other parts of the developing world, began to narrow the proportionate
income and technology gaps with the early industrializers.
Decolonization accelerated convergence on a global scale. During the
period from 1820 to 1950, the rich North Atlantic countries grew faster
than the poorer rest of the world. The gap between rich and poor countries
widened, and an increasing share of world output and income originated
in Europe and North America. Starting with decolonization after World
War II, the newly independent countries began to catch up. The share
of world income produced in Asia, Africa, and Latin America began to
increase (figure 7.8). The relative low point of those countries was the year
1950, when Latin America, Asia, and Africa together constituted just
30 percent of world output but 70 percent of the world’s population.
Since 1950, the world has been on an unprecedented path of techno-
logical and economic convergence, and the gains have been much broader
than income alone. Throughout the developing world, life expectancy has
been rising, years of schooling have increased, rates of extreme poverty have
been falling, and employment has been shifting away from manual labor
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166
to more remunerative, higher skilled, and less arduous work than the tra-
ditional jobs in smallholder subsistence agriculture and mining. The task of
development is by no means complete: there are still around 700 million
people trapped in extreme poverty, and hundreds of millions more who are
just one step ahead of destitution. Nonetheless, the progress against pov-
erty is real and substantial.17
There is more convergence to come, as the benefits of technological
advance are increased by the digital revolution. If well harnessed by devel-
oping countries, the new wave of technologies—artificial intelligence,
smart systems, robotics, high-speed wireless broadband—are likely to spur
further convergent economic growth. And with convergence has come a
rising geopolitical weight of the developing countries in global affairs.
The United States, as the global leader between 1950 and 2000, had a
complex and ambiguous attitude toward decolonization, convergence,
and the rising voice of developing countries in world affairs. In the early
post–World War II period, the United States championed decolonization.
This fit well with the U.S. aim of replacing Britain and France at the helm
of global affairs. During the 1960s and 1970s, the United States continued
70 Pe
rc en
t o f w
o rl
d to
ta l
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
18 20
18 27
18 34
18 41
18 48
18 55
18 62
18 69
18 76
18 83
18 90
18 97
19 04
19 11
19 18
19 25
19 32
19 39
19 46
19 53
19 60
19 67
19 74
19 81
19 88
19 95
20 02
The Share of World Output Beyond the North Atlantic
(Asia, Latin America, and Africa), 1820–2008
Source: Jutta Bolt, Robert Inklaar, Herman de Jong, and Jan Luiten van Zanden.
“Rebasing ‘Maddison’: New Income Comparisons and the Shape of Long-Run Economic
Development.” GGDC Research Memorandum 174 (2018).
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167
generally to champion the economic interests of the developing countries—
in part to lure them into the U.S. alliance against the Soviet Union—but as
the developing countries gained economic strength and political voice, the
U.S. position began to change. When developing countries at the United
Nations called for a “New International Economic Order” in the 1970s,
with the aim of rebalancing global power and wealth between the devel-
oped and the developing countries, the U.S. attitude turned hostile, insist-
ing that the developing world get in line behind U.S. leadership—or else.
With the presidency of Donald Trump, the U.S. position had become
“America First,” a stark declaration of U.S. self-interest over international-
ist objectives. Many American strategists began to see convergence, espe-
cially China’s convergence, as a direct threat to U.S. interests rather than an
objective of U.S. policy.
Some Lessons from the Industrial Age
The Industrial Age marks a distinct and remarkable phase in the history of
globalization. For the first time in history, technological progress was rapid
enough and broad enough to create sustained and rapid increases in mate-
rial living standards. For the first 150 years of the new age, the economic
gains went overwhelmingly to a small part of humanity: Western Europe,
the United States, and a few other industrializing countries. Much of the
world fell into deeper misery, with unabated poverty combined with politi-
cal subservience to the industrial empires.
Britain, the first mover of the industrial era, also became the world’s first
superpower—indeed, the world’s first hegemonic power. Yet as we have
learned at every phase of history, even seemingly impregnable power can
quickly dissipate. In the case of Britain, this rapid loss of power occurred as
the result of tragedy: two world wars and an intervening Great Depression.
The great lasting legacies of British leadership include the spread of parlia-
mentary democracy to many of the former colonies, the shared institutions
of global commerce, and perhaps most consequentially, the use of English
as a lingua franca of global business, government, tourism, and science. No
other language rivals English as a global second language—that is, as a
language spoken in addition to one’s mother tongue. It is estimated that
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168
around 1 billion people today speak English, of which around 500 million
speak English as their second language, and English has become the global
language of science, finance, and diplomacy.
After World War II, the United States claimed the mantle of global
hegemon, but the U.S. position too now looks increasingly tenuous as
power spreads more widely in the world. The end of European imperial
rule in Africa and Asia set loose a process of sustained growth in the for-
mer colonies—growth that has not been even, to be sure, but rapid enough
to bring significant increases in output per person, reductions in extreme
poverty, rapid urbanization, and structural shifts away from arduous physi-
cal labor, with more opportunities for schooling and leisure. The most
remarkable case of convergent growth is China. Over the course of roughly
forty years, from the beginning of market reforms in 1978 until now, China
has eliminated extreme poverty and created a technologically dynamic
economy. Geopolitical power and technological prowess are no longer the
privileged preserve of the North Atlantic.
Thus we have arrived at the seventh age of globalization, in which digi-
tal technologies are reshaping global economics and geopolitics. Every
sector of the economy will be affected by the digital technologies, and
global power relations are once again shifting as well. The new complex
global scene is made even more complicated by the ecological crisis that
has accompanied global economic growth. From a global perspective, the
world’s main challenges are clear: to continue the process of economic con-
vergence while addressing rising inequalities within nations, shifting geo-
politics, and increasingly dire environmental threats. This is the drama to
which we now turn.
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It is estimated that in 2020 the world will create and trans-mit roughly 44 zettabytes of data per day.1 In numbers, that is 44,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, each byte carrying the infor- mation of one letter or number. Yet soon enough, these staggering numbers
will be superseded by even more remarkable numbers. The ubiquity and
scale of data processing and transmission are utterly mind-boggling. Here
are some other estimates as of 2019:
• 1.6 billion Facebook log-ons each day
• 3.5 billion Google searches each day
• 5 billion YouTube videos watched each day
• 4.4 billion Internet users (as of June 30, 2019), of which 829 million are in
China, 560 million in India, and 293 million in the United States
• $5 trillion cross-border settlements daily through the SWIFT banking system2
In the twenty-first century, the world has arrived at ubiquitous connec-
tivity. And there is more connectivity to come with advances in the cover-
age and capabilities of the Internet and related digital systems such as 5G.
The digital revolution is so deep that we can rightly consider our era to be a
new seventh age of globalization.
8 The Digital Age
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170
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 globaliza-
tion during the past two centuries have sown the seeds of ecological crisis
as well, as human activities—especially fossil-fuel use, farming, transport,
and industrial production—have created new and profound challenges of
human-induced climate change, the mass destruction of biodiversity, and
the dire pollution of the air, soils, freshwater, and oceans. Another set of
challenges will arise from further rapid changes in demographics, including
the size of the world population, its age structure, its distribution by region,
and the share of the world living in urban versus rural areas.
In this century, therefore, we will see the unfolding of several pow-
erful trends: the continued economic rise of China and India, the rela-
tive decline of the United States in world output and global power, the
rapid population and economic growth of Africa, and a further steep rise
in urbanization, along with the ubiquity of digital technologies and their
uses. Our social and political systems will be under great stress given the
dramatic changes ahead. As the great evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson
has summarized it in his book The Social Conquest of Earth, we exist with
a bizarre combination of “Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and
godlike technology.”
The Digital Revolution
The uptake of digital technologies is the fastest technological change in
history. Facebook, Google, and Amazon came out of nowhere to become,
in a few short years, among the most powerful companies in the world.
Smartphones are only a decade old, but they have already upended how we
live. How did this revolution come about?
The roots of the digital revolution can be traced to a remarkable paper
by British genius Alan Turing, writing in 1936. Turing envisioned a new
conceptual device, a universal computing machine—a Turing machine, as
it became known—that could read an endless tape of 0s and 1s in order to
calculate anything that could be calculated. Turing had conceptualized a
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The Digital Age
171
general-purpose programmable computer before one had been invented.
His ideas would fundamentally shape the digital revolution to come. Tur-
ing also made legendary contributions to the Allied war effort by showing
how to use mathematical cryptography and an early electronic device to
decipher the Nazi military secret code. (For all his genius and his contribu-
tions, a towering figure in the entire history of mathematics, Turing was
hounded by British authorities after World War II for his homosexuality,
and possibly driven to suicide, as the cause of his death remains disputed.)
The next step in the digital revolution came out of another remarkable
mind, that of John von Neumann, who conceptualized in 1945 the basic
architecture of the modern computer, with a processing unit, control unit,
working memory, input and output devices, and external mass storage.
Von Neumann’s computer architecture became the design of the first com-
puters, devices using vacuum tubes to implement the computer’s logical
circuitry. MIT engineer and mathematician Claude Shannon provided
the mathematics of the logical gates and processing systems to implement
Turing’s programs of 0s and 1s on von Neumann’s computer architecture.
The next piece of the puzzle was solved in 1947, with the invention of the
modern transistor at Bell Laboratories, which built on advances in under-
standing of semiconductors gained during the radar work of World War II.
The transistor replaced the vacuum tube in Shannon’s logical circuitry and
enabled the development of microprocessing units with first thousands,
then millions, and then billions of transistors. In the early 1950s, the indi-
vidual transistors were soldered onto motherboards. From 1958 to 1961, two
pioneers, Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby, developed ways to etch transistors
and other electronic components directly onto silicon wafers, inventing
the integrated circuit. With the integrated circuit, it became possible to
put larger and larger numbers of transistors, and therefore faster and more
powerful microprocessors, onto a silicon chip. This miniaturization enabled
the exponential increases in computing speed, memory, and data transmis-
sion that underpin the digital revolution.
As computers began to penetrate scientific, military, and business work,
the U.S. Department of Defense asked a basic question: How can comput-
ers communicate with each other, and do so in a resilient way that would
survive the disruption of networks in a war? The answer was a method for
sending data packets (bits of 0s and 1s) between computers according to
flexible routing, a method known as “packet switching,” that became the
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172
basis for a new Internet. Initially a U.S. government project, the Internet
was later made available to a group of participating U.S. universities before
it was opened for commercial use in 1987.
In 1965, Gordon Moore, then the head of Intel, an early manufacturer
of integrated circuitry that would become the global pacesetter, noticed
that the transistor count etched into a microchip of silicon was doubling
roughly every one to two years. Moreover, he predicted that the trend
would continue for the coming decade. That was a half-century ago, and
Moore’s observation and prediction proved to be prescient. The doubling
time for various attributes of microprocessing (speed, transistor count, and
cost, among others) continued the pattern of rapid geometric growth until
the 2010s, with a modest recent slowdown compensated by gains in other
dimensions of computation. Intel’s 4004 microprocessor in 1971 had 2,300
transistors. Intel’s Xeon Platinum microprocessor in 2017 had 8 billion
transistors. This is roughly a two-year doubling time over forty-six years,
or twenty-three doublings. Moore’s law is shown in figure 8.1, illustrated by
the development of Intel’s microprocessors.
Computer capacities soared, and so too did connectivity. The develop-
ment of fiber-optic cables enabled a vast increase in the speed, accuracy,
and scale of data transmission. Microwave transmission enabled a revolu-
tion in wireless connectivity, so that mobile devices could connect to the
0
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Tr an
si st
o r c
o u
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io n
s)
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2
3
4
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6
7
8
9
Moore’s Law in Action: Transistor Count on Intel Chips, 1971–2016
Source: Wikipedia contributors;Transistor count Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index
.php?title=Transistor_count&oldid=923570554.
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173
Internet. At the same time, massive advances were made in the ability to
digitize materials—text, images, and video—along with countless advances
in scientific probes and measurements, such as satellite imagery, gene
sequencing, and sensors collecting vast amounts of real-time information
from devices.
The uptake of mobile phones parallels the Internet in speed of the dis-
semination of a breakthrough digital technology. The mobile phone was
invented at Bell Labs in 1973. From a few thousand phone subscribers in
the early 1980s, mobile subscriptions reached 7.8 billion in 2017 (figure 8.2).
The third dimension of the digital revolution is the intelligence of the
computers. Once again, Turing took the lead, asking the pivotal question:
Can machines have intelligence, and if so, how would we know? In 1950,
he posed the famous Turing test of machine intelligence: An intelligent
machine (computer-based system) would be able to interact with humans
in a way that the humans would not be able to distinguish whether they
were interacting with a machine or a human being. For example, the
human subject could carry on a conversation with a machine or a person
located in another room, passing messages to and receiving messages from
that room, without knowing whether the counterpart was a person or an
intelligent machine.
Whether or not machines will reach a form of generalized intelligence,
there is no doubt that machines are increasingly able to learn and carry
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20 17
Mobile Subscribers Worldwide, 1990–2017
Source: “Mobile Phone Market Forecast - 2019.” areppim: information, pure and simple,
2019, https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_mobilex2019.htm.
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174
out sophisticated tasks once regarded as the unique purview of highly
intelligent human beings. Smart machines now routinely translate texts,
identify objects in pictures, drive cars, and play games requiring highly
sophisticated skills. Marvelous breakthroughs have been achieved in the
past decade through applications of artificial neural networks, currently the
mainstay of artificial intelligence.
Artificial neural networks process digital inputs and generate digital
outputs based on processing of the inputs through a sequence of layers of
artificial neurons. As shown in figure 8.3, digital data from the input level
are processed one layer at the time until the signals culminate at the output
layer, which then selects an action. The input layer may, for example, code
the pixels of a digital image such as an X-ray, or code the board position of
a game of chess, or code digitally a natural-language text. The output level
would then code the machine’s diagnosis of the X-ray, or its chess move, or
the computer translation of text into a designated natural language.
The key to the “intelligence” of the artificial neural network is the math-
ematical weighting that each artificial neuron attaches to incoming signals
that it receives from the lower layer of neurons, which determine the sig-
nal that the neuron sends onward to the neurons in the next higher level.
These weights may be analogized to the strength of synapses connecting
neurons in the human brain. They define the network of artificial neurons
that translate the digital signals of the input layer into the digital signals
produced by the output layer.
The mathematical weights are adjusted by “training” the machine
using sophisticated algorithms that update the weights assigned to each
neuron based on the performance of the machine in a given test run.
Input layer
Output layer
Hidden layer 1 Hidden layer 2
The Basic Structure of Neural Networks for Artificial Intelligence
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175
The weights are adjusted in order to improve the performance of the com-
puter, for example in correctly identifying images, or winning chess games,
or translating text. The mathematical process of refining the weights in
order to generate high-quality output actions is called “machine learning.”
For example, if the machine is being trained to identify tumors in a digi-
tal X-ray, the mathematical weights connecting the artificial neurons are
adjusted depending on whether the machine’s diagnosis is correct or incor-
rect on each test image. With enough “supervised learning” of this sort,
and using sophisticated mathematical techniques for updating the weights
of the artificial neural network, machine learning results in artificial intel-
ligence systems with remarkable skills.
With the vast increases in computational capacity and speed of comput-
ers represented by Moore’s law, artificial intelligence systems are now being
built with hundreds of layers of digital neurons and very high-dimensional
digital inputs and outputs. With sufficiently large “training sets” of data or
ingenious designs of self-play described below, neural networks are achiev-
ing superhuman skills on a rapidly expanding array of challenges, from
board games like Chess and Go, to interpersonal games such as poker, to
sophisticated language operations such as real-time translation, and to pro-
fessional medical skills such as complex diagnostics.
The rapidity of advancement has been breathtaking. In 1997, former
world chess champion Garry Kasparov played IBM’s Deep Blue com-
puter. To Kasparov’s amazement and consternation, he was beaten by the
computer. In that early case, Deep Blue had been programmed in expert
play using a vast library of historic games and board positions. Today, a
“self-taught” AI chess system can learn chess from scratch in a few hours,
with no library of games or any other expert inputs on chess strategy, and
trounce not only the current world chess champion but all past computer
champions such as Deep Blue.
In 2011, another IBM system, named Watson, learned to play the TV
game show Jeopardy, with all of the puns and quips of popular culture and
natural language, and beat world-class Jeopardy champions live on televi-
sion. This too was a startling achievement, edging yet closer to passing the
Turing test. After the Jeopardy championship, Watson went on to the field
of medicine, working with doctors to hone expert diagnostic systems.
More recently, we have seen stunning breakthroughs in deep neural net-
works, that is neural networks with hundreds of layers of artificial neurons.
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176
In 2016, an AI system, AlphaGo from the company Deep Mind, took on
the world’s eighteen-time world Go champion, Lee Sedol. Go is a board
game of such sophistication and subtlety that it was widely believed that
machines would be unable to compete with human experts for years or
decades to come. Sedol, like Kasparov before him, believed that he would
triumph easily over AlphaGo. In the event, he was decisively defeated by the
system. Then, to make matters even more dramatic, AlphaGo was decisively
defeated by a next-generation AI system that learned Go from scratch in
self-play over a few hours. Once again, hundreds of years of expert study and
competition could be surpassed in a few hours of learning through self-play.
The advent of learning through self-play, sometimes called “tabula rasa”
or blank-slate learning, is mind-boggling. In tabula-rasa learning, the AI
system is trained to play against itself, for example in millions of games
of chess, with the weights of the neural networks updated depending on
the wins and losses in self-play. Starting from no information whatsoever
other than the rules of chess, the AI system plays against itself in millions
of chess games and uses the results to update the neural-network weights
in order to learn chess-playing skills. Remarkably, in just four hours of self-
play, an advanced computer AI system developed by the company Deep-
Mind learned all of the skills needed to handily defeat the world’s best
human chess players as well as the previous AI world-champion chess
player!3 A few hours of blank-slate learning bested 600 years of learning of
chess play by all of the chess experts in history.
Technological Advances and the End of Poverty
In 2006, I published a book titled The End of Poverty in which I suggested
that the end of extreme poverty was within the reach of our generation,
indeed by 2025, if we made increased global efforts to help the poor.4
I had in mind special efforts to bolster health, education, and infrastructure
for the world’s poorest people, notably in sub-Saharan African and South
Asia, home to most of the world’s extreme poverty. Since the end of the last
century, remarkable progress has indeed been achieved. The World Bank
data for the period 1990 to 2015 are shown in figure 8.4. In 1990, an esti-
mated 1.9 billion people lived in extreme poverty, equal to 35.9 percent of
the world’s population. By 2015, the number had dropped to 736 million, or
just 10 percent of the world’s population.5
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177
The most important single reason for this progress was certainly the
rapid advances in technologies that enabled major achievements in dis-
ease control, access to knowledge, financial inclusion (such as the abil-
ity to secure loans), and rise in incomes and decent work conditions in
even the poorest parts of the world. The digital revolution is speeding the
uptake not only of digitally related technologies but of other technologies
as well, through the rapid dissemination of knowledge, skills, and techni-
cal systems facilitated through digital connectivity. The greatest advances
in poverty reduction were certainly those achieved by China, where rates
of extreme poverty plummeted from an estimated 66 percent of the
Chinese population in 1990 to essentially zero by 2020, an economic mir-
acle by any standard!6
Even faster global poverty reduction could have been achieved by now,
and can still be achieved in the future, if the global community makes a
greater targeted effort. When aid has been targeted to specific challenges
of very poor communities—such as disease control, school attendance, and
access to infrastructure—progress has been much faster than when progress
depends on the general forces of economic growth alone. Still, the progress
50 1,895 1,878 1,703 1,729
35.9 33.9
29.4 28.6 25.7
20.8 18.1
13.7 11.2
10.0
1,610
1,352 1,223
963 804
736
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25
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s
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(% )
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200
0
Number of people who live below US$1.90 a day (2011 PPP) (right axis)
Share of people who live below US$1.90 a day (2011 PPP)
The Rate of Extreme Poverty (Rate and Headcount), 1990–2015
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178
to date gave the UN member states the confidence to set 2030 as the target
date for ending extreme poverty when they adopted the Sustainable Devel-
opment Goals in 2015. Achieving SDG 1, ending extreme poverty by 2030,
is a huge ambition and is indeed out of reach with business as usual, but it
could be accomplished if the rich countries took their responsibilities and
commitments towards the poor countries more seriously.
Convergent Growth and China’s Surge to the Forefront
The second half of the twentieth century was marked by the shift from
overall global economic divergence to overall global convergence. The first
150 years of industrialization widened the gap between the rich and poor
countries, and indeed left much of the developing world under the impe-
rial yoke of Europe’s industrial nations. Yet after World War II, the poor
regions of the world were able to increase their rate of growth after they
achieved independence from colonial rule. Political sovereignty gave the
newly independent nations the freedom of maneuver to increase pub-
lic investments in health, education, and infrastructure. Not all managed
well. Some fell into debt, others into high inflation, but many succeeded
in building systems of public health and education, and raising the human
capital needed for economic growth. On average, the developing countries
grew more rapidly in GDP per capita than the high-income nations, so
that the relative gap in incomes began to shrink.
This pattern has continued into the twenty-first century, as shown by the
International Monetary Fund data in figure 8.5. The growth rate of GDP
per capita of the developing countries has generally outpaced that of the
developed countries by 1–5 percentage points per year, though by a dimin-
ished margin in the 2010s. The faster growth in GDP per capita, com-
bined with a higher rate of population growth, has meant that the share of
global output produced by the developing countries has also been rising—
the same pattern that we observed in the previous chapter for the period
between 1950 and 2008. The shifting proportions of global output of the
developed and developing countries are shown in figure 8.6. Whereas the
developed countries accounted for 57 percent of world output in 2000, their
share declined to around 41 percent of world output as of 2018 according
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30
40
50
60
Sh ar
e o
f w o
rl d
o u
tp u
t (%
)
70
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Developed Developing
Trading Places: Shares of Global Output Produced by Advanced and
Developing Countries, 2000–2018
Source: International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database, October 2019.
–6.0
–4.0
–2.0
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Developed Developing
G D
P p
er c
ap it
a g
ro w
th ra
te (%
)
Growth Rate of GDP Per Capita, Developed and Developing
Countries, 2000–2018
Source: IMF World Economic Outlook. Developed countries are the
“Advanced Economies,” and developing countries are the “Emerging market
and developing countries.” Data are for GDP per capita at 2011 international dollars.
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180
to the IMF estimates. Of course the developing country share rose from
43 percent to 59 percent. Within nineteen years, the two regions had traded
places in their global shares of output.
The most dramatic single change in recent times has been the surge
in economic development, and therefore the global role, of China. After
nearly 140 years of economic and social strife, marked by foreign incur-
sions, domestic rebellions, civil wars, and internal policy blunders of
historic dimensions, China settled down after 1978 to stable, open, market-
based production and trade, relying on the catch-up strategy that it had
observed to be so successful in its near-neighborhood. Japan had pioneered
the strategy back at the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and the
years that followed, and had applied it again in Japan’s post–World War II
recovery. Then the four “Asian tigers”—South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong,
and Singapore—had demonstrated the success of export-led, labor-inten-
sive manufacturing. China embarked on that path decisively with the rise
to power of the brilliant pragmatic reformer Deng Xiaoping in 1978.
Following Deng’s sage advice on pragmatic market opening and his
famed nonideological approach (“It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black
or white so long as it catches mice”), China achieved around 10 percent
per year GDP growth for nearly thirty-five years, roughly from 1980 to
2015. Growth at 10 percent per year results in a doubling every seven years.
Over thirty-five years, that means five doublings, or a cumulative growth of
2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 = 32 times. In fact, according to IMF data, China grew just
under 10 percent per year (9.8 percent), so that cumulative growth came to
an increase of twenty-six times, an extraordinary result.7
The result is shown in figure 8.7. Measured at purchasing-power-
adjusted prices, China is now the world’s largest economy, surpassing the
United States (on the IMF’s measure) in the year 2013, with the gap in
favor of China continuing in recent years. China’s growth has been roughly
3–4 percentage points per year higher than that of the United States
(6 percent per annum in China compared with 3 percent in the United
States most recently). Note that China’s overtaking of the United States is
in aggregate terms. China’s per capita GDP is still only around one-third
that of the United States in purchasing-power-parity terms, and roughly
one-fifth the U.S. level at market exchange rates and prices. Because China’s
per capita income is still far lower than that of the US and other high-
income countries, China still has the opportunity for rapid “catching-up”
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181
growth, albeit at a pace that is slower than during 1978–2015. As China con-
tinues to narrow the relative gap in GDP per capita with the US, China’s
economy will become significantly larger than the US economy in absolute
size, given that China’s population is roughly four times larger.
One of the key reasons we should expect China’s continued vitality and
rapid economic growth is that China has moved from being an importer of
technologies from the United States and Europe to becoming a major tech-
nology innovator and exporter in its own right. An example of China’s new
technological prowess is in high-speed wireless technology, notably 5G sys-
tems. It is the Chinese company Huawei, not a U.S. or European firm, that is
leading the rollout of 5G. The United States has expressed alarm at Huawei’s
success and has tried to block its access to world markets, accusing Huawei
of being a security threat. Yet one cannot help feeling that such claims are
merely geopolitics at play. The U.S. government seems to be alarmed mainly
by Huawei’s success in a cutting-edge digital technology rather than by any
specific security risk. Indeed, the U.S. government has provided no evidence
of specific risks in its public campaign against the company.
China United States
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Changing Places: Chinese and U.S. Shares of World
Output, 1980–2018
Source: International Monetary Fund. “China: Gross domestic product based on purchasing-
power-parity (PPP) share of world total (Percent)”, World Economic Outlook (April 2019).
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182
More generally, China’s efforts at innovation are soaring. Based on key
metrics of research and development—including R&D expenditures, the
training and employment of technical workers, the number of new pat-
ents, and the sales of high-tech goods—China has rapidly become a high-
tech world power. Figure 8.8 shows R&D outlays as a share of GDP for
the United States, the European Union, and China. It is clear that China’s
R&D investments are rising rapidly, overtaking the EU on this measure. It
is also clear that venture capital (VC) funds are moving into Chinese com-
panies at a greatly increased rate, with VC investments in China overtaking
VC investments in the European Union, as shown in figure 8.9.
The results are paying off in patents. According to the World Intellec-
tual Property Organization, as of 2017 China became the second largest
source of patent applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).
In 2017, the United States filed 56,624 PCT applications, followed by
China at 48,882, Japan at 48,208, Germany at 18,982, and South Korea at
15,763.8 If we think regionally rather than nationally, we can say that there
are now three centers of endogenous growth in the world economy: the
United States European Union China
0.0
R& D
e xp
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(in p
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G D
P)
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R&D Outlays as a Share of GDP, United States, EU and China
Source: National Science Board. In Science and Engineering Indicators 2018 Alexandria,
VA: National Science Foundation, 2018.
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183
United States; the European Union; and northeast Asia, including three
R&D powerhouses: China, Japan, and South Korea. For the first time since
the industrial revolution, innovation is not centered in the North Atlantic
region alone. As during the long stretch of globalization before 1500 CE,
we are again likely to see key technologies of the future in a two-way flow
between east and west.
The Challenges of Sustainable Development
With convergent growth and falling poverty, the world economy might
seem to be out of the woods. Technological advances have put the end of
poverty within reach, along with a rebalancing of the international order
that is much fairer to the countries outside of the North Atlantic region.
Yet complacency would be misplaced, and the rising anxiety levels seen
around the world reflect deep reasons for worry. This Digital Age poses at
least three great risks.
United States China EU
0.0
10.0
20.0
30.0
40.0
50.0
60.0
$ B
ill io
n s
(U SD
)
70.0
80.0
2006 20082007 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
Early- and Later-stage Venture Capitalism Investments
Source: National Science Board. In Science and Engineering Indicators 2018 Alexandria,
VA: National Science Foundation, 2018.
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184
The first global risk is a dramatic and destabilizing increase in economic
inequality at the very time when technology properly harnessed holds
the promise of ending poverty. The gains from economic growth are not
being evenly shared. Within many countries, including both the United
States and China, inequality has soared alongside economic growth. While
the earnings of some workers are soaring, especially those with advanced
degrees, the earnings of workers whose jobs are being replaced by robots
and artificial intelligence are stagnant or falling. While those enjoying a
boost in income could, in principle, compensate those falling behind, in
fact, there is far too little income redistribution taking place in the United
States and many other countries.
The second global risk is a devastating global environmental crisis. Two
hundred years of rapid economic growth have unleashed several intercon-
nected global environmental shocks. The first is human-induced global
warming resulting from the massive emission of heat-absorbing green-
house gases into the atmosphere. The biggest culprit is carbon dioxide
(CO 2 ) emitted by burning fossil fuels. The second is the massive loss of
biodiversity, with an estimated 1 million species under threat of extinction
according to a major recent analysis.9 The main culprit in biodiversity loss
is the massive conversion of land agricultural production, with so much
habitat taken from other species that they are being pushed to the edge
of extinction. The third is the mega-pollution of the air, soils, freshwater,
and oceans. We are assaulting the environment with industrial chemicals,
plastics, and other waste flows that are not properly recycled or reduced in
production and consumption.
The third global risk is war, in a world armed to the teeth. War at this
moment among the major countries might seem unimaginable, so terrible
and devastating would be the consequences. Yet the same was said about
the possibility of major war in 1910, on the eve of the First World War. It
is widely supposed today, as it was supposed in 1910, that the lack of war
between the major powers would be sustained indefinitely into the future.
Yet history proves otherwise. Each new age of globalization, accompanied
by deep shifts in geopolitical power, have typically been accompanied by
war. We will have to make extraordinary peacebuilding efforts in the com-
ing years to avoid the self-defeating patterns of conflict that have been so
prevalent throughout history.
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185
These challenges—inequality, environmental crisis, and the fragility of
peace—are the key reasons that many scientists, moral leaders, and states-
men have urged the world to adopt the precepts of sustainable develop-
ment. The concept itself stands for a holistic approach to globalization,
one that combines economic growth with social inclusion, environmental
sustainability, and peaceful societies. The theory of sustainable develop-
ment and the history of globalization suggest that market-based growth
can never be enough. Since the start of capitalist globalization in the 1500s,
the global economic system has been a ruthless, violent affair, not one in
which inequality and war were fundamentally solved. And now we have
the added environmental challenges that are complex, global in scale, and
without precedent for our species. We are endangering the planet in ways
we have never done before, without a guidebook on how to move forward.
The Challenge of Inequality
Technological advances contain within them the seeds of rising inequal-
ity, as new technologies create winners and losers in the marketplace. The
advent of the spinning jenny and power loom displaced and impoverished
multitudes of spinners and weavers in India. The mechanization of agri-
culture impoverished countless smallholder farmers around the world who
desperately fled to the cities to find a livelihood. The introduction of robots
on the assembly lines of automobile plants have created unemployment
and falling wages for workers laid off from those factories. And now comes
the digital economy, with even smarter machines and systems to do the
tasks currently carried out by workers. Who will win and who will lose?
Generally, the future labor-market winners will be those with higher
skills that machines cannot displace, or with the skills to work along-
side the new intelligent machines, such as the tech skills to program the
new machines. The losers will be the workers whose tasks are more eas-
ily replaced by robots and artificial intelligence. In the past forty years,
job losses have been concentrated in the goods-producing sectors, nota-
bly in agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. Those job losses will con-
tinue in the future. Both agriculture and mining are increasingly being
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186
automated, with self-driving vehicles such as tractor-combines and large
digging and transport equipment at mining sites. Robots are continuing
to replace workers on factory floors in several manufacturing sectors. And
it seems clear that other jobs in the service sector will also vanish in the
future. Trucks and taxis may well become self-driving, thereby displacing
millions of professional drivers. Warehouses are increasingly operated with
robots carrying, stacking, and packaging the merchandise. And retail stores
are giving way to e-commerce and direct delivery of purchases, again with
expert systems and potentially self-driving delivery vehicles.
In recent decades, lower-skilled workers displaced by machines have
seen their earnings stagnate or decline, while higher-skilled workers have
been made more productive by those same machines and have seen their
earnings rise. These trends have been a key reason for the rising inequal-
ity of income in many countries, notably including the United States. Yet
the ultimate effect of this tendency depends on two additional factors.
To the extent that low-skilled workers can gain higher skills through
increased education and training, the proportion of the workforce suffer-
ing from stagnant or declining earnings can be reduced. And even when
market wages are pushed down, governments can compensate for those
adverse market forces through increased taxation of those with high
and rising incomes and increased transfers to those with low and falling
incomes, so that all segments of society share in the gains from techno-
logical advance.
The development challenges may also be amplified for the poorest
countries in the world, since those countries generally depend on labor-
intensive export earnings to finance their future economic growth. Yet the
digital revolution is replacing low-cost labor with smart machines. The
rapid advances in robotics, for example, are resulting in the automation of
jobs in textiles and apparel that in the past were the stepping-stone indus-
tries for low-wage countries climbing the ladder of economic development.
While the digital revolution will surely help the poorest countries in cer-
tain areas—such as low-cost health care, expanded educational opportuni-
ties, and improvements in infrastructure—the digital revolution may also
cut off traditional pathways for economic development. In that case, global
solidarity, wherein rich countries provide added development assistance to
enable the poorest countries to invest in the new digital technologies and
the accompanying skills, may become vital.
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187
The Challenge of Planetary Boundaries
The environmental challenges may seem even more daunting and, in the
view of many observers, insoluble. Is there not an inherent contradiction
between endless growth of the world economy and a finite planet? The
world economy has increased roughly a hundredfold over the past two cen-
turies: roughly ten times the population and ten times the GDP per capita.
Yet the physical planet has remained constant, and the human impact on
the environment has therefore intensified dramatically.
One basic calculation puts it this way: The human impact is equal to the
population times GDP/population times impact/GDP, sometimes sum-
marized as I = P × A × T, where I is impact, P is population, A is affluence
(GDP per capita), and T is technology (impact/GDP).10 What is clear
from this equation is that per capita economic growth (a rise in A ) or pop-
ulation growth (a rise in P ) must lead to a greater human impact (I ) on
the planet unless offset by an improvement in technology (lower T ), in the
sense of a lower environmental impact per unit of GDP.
Some kinds of technological advances, such as the steam engine, raise
A but also raise T because of greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollution.
Other kinds of technological advances, such as improvements in photo-
voltaic solar cells, raise A and lower the environmental impact per unit of
GDP (a fall in T ), with a net overall effect of lowering rather than raising
the human impact on the planet. Economic growth is therefore sustainable
if the rise in P and A are offset by a sufficiently large decline in T—that is,
by technologies that lower the impact on the planet per unit of GDP.
The bad news is that global growth during the past two hundred years
has tended to be neutral or increasing in T. Dependence on fossil fuels,
land clearing for agriculture, bottom trawling for fish, clear-cutting of trop-
ical hardwoods, and fracking for oil and gas are all examples of techno-
logical advances that intensify the human impact on the environment. We
have arrived in the twenty-first century, therefore, with a planet at the very
limits of habitability as a result of two centuries of rapid growth combined
with intensifying environmental impacts.
The good news is that there are plenty of opportunities today for major
technological shifts to lower T, the human impact per unit of GDP. These
include the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy (wind, solar, hydro,
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188
geothermal, and others), which would provide more energy with lower
greenhouse-gas emissions. Another opportunity is the shift in diet from
heavy meat eating, especially beef eating, toward the use of more plant pro-
teins, which would improve human health while also reducing the pres-
sures on land for feed grains and pastures. A third opportunity is improved
building designs, which can greatly reduce the need for heating and cool-
ing and thereby the demand for energy. A fourth opportunity is precision
agriculture, meaning more precise applications of water and fertilizers—for
example, through drip irrigation and fertigation (direct injection of the fer-
tilizers via the irrigation system).
The key to sustainability, in short, is the transformation of technolo-
gies and behaviors (such as plant-based diets, or choosing walking over
driving) that can deliver the same GDP or higher GDP with a lower
environmental impact. Recent breakthroughs in technology, such as dra-
matic cost reductions in photovoltaics, the development of biodegrad-
able plastics, the development of plant-based substitutes for meats, and
the improvement of agricultural methods to reduce the use of pesticides,
water, and chemical fertilizers, are all examples of trajectories that com-
bine higher GDP with lower environmental costs. Throughout most of
history, humanity has been profligate with nature: use it, lose it, and move
on. Yet in our time, there is no possibility of simply moving on. We have
filled every nook and cranny of the planet and pushed the environmental
crisis to a global scale. The scale of the sustainability challenge is therefore
unprecedented, threatening all of the planet, and all of humanity, in ways
that we have never before faced. We must therefore lower T, our impact
on the planet per unit of GDP.
The framework of Planetary Boundaries helps us keep track of the key
environmental challenges and the needed technologies and behaviors to
address them. In the iconic depiction of planetary boundaries shown in
figure 8.10, there are nine main planetary boundaries. Starting from due
north and moving counter-clockwise around the circle, the planetary
boundaries are climate change (from greenhouse-gas emissions); bio-
spheric integrity (both genetic diversity and functional diversity); land-
system change (notably deforestation); freshwater use (heavily related
to irrigation); biogeochemical flows (notably nitrogen and phosphorus
from fertilizer use); ocean acidification (from the high concentration
of CO 2 in the atmosphere); atmospheric aerosol loading (from burning
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189
fossil fuels and biomass); stratospheric ozone depletion (from the use of
chlorofluorocarbons); and novel entities (chemical pollutants including
pesticides and plastics).
These planetary boundaries are threatened mainly by greenhouse-gas
emissions, poor agricultural practices and diets, and chemical pollutants
and inadequate waste management. All of these problems have technologi-
cal and behavioral solutions that can raise or sustain output while lowering
environmental impacts. Our challenge is to plan carefully and soundly, and
Planetary Boundaries
Source: J. Lokrantz/Azote based on Will Steffen, Katherine Richardson, Johan Rockström,
Sarah E. Cornell, Ingo Fetzer, Elena M. Bennett, Reinette Biggs, et al. “Planetary Boundaries:
Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet.” Science 347, no. 6223 (2015): 1259855.
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190
then regulate businesses methodically, to diminish or ban those technolo-
gies that are exacerbating the environmental crises.
The global challenge is not only the range of changes needed, but also
their urgency and global scale. Everywhere we look on the planet we see
dire and rising threats. The air across Asia, for example, is chronically pol-
luted from fossil-fuel use and often from biomass burning. Figure 8.11
shows Guangzhou, China, beset by smog. Life-threatening air pollution
afflicts major cities around the world.
Figure 8.12, a scene of desperation along the Kenya-Somalia border
in the drought of 2011, reminds us of the growing intensity of droughts
in many of the world’s most impoverished drylands, creating conditions
of famine and displacement that threaten the survival of the poorest
of the poor. Figure 8.13 shows vividly the hazards of excessive nitrogen
and phosphorous flows from farms to the coasts, in this case in north-
eastern China. The beaches are covered in algal blooms that will lead to
Smog in Guangzhou, China
Source: Stefan Leitner. “Guangzhou,” licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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Drought in Kenya-Somalia Border Region, 2011
Source: Sodexo USA, “IMG_0748_JPG,” licensed under CC BY 2.0
Young Boy Swimming in Algal Bloom in Shandong, China
Source: Photo: Reuters/China Daily
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192
oxygen-deficient waters and a die-off of marine life. Figure 8.14 is a global
map prepared by the U.S. space agency NASA. The red coastal areas show
the parts the planet that would be inundated by a six-meter sea-level rise,
a scale of sea-level rise that is alas consistent with our current trajectory
of global warming.
The Risks of Conflict
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 the Americas.
The transition to the Industrial Age was marked by Britain’s conquests of
India and its wars against China, and the mass suffering that ensued. Now
the transition to the Digital Age threatens conflict anew, with one of the
biggest risks being a possible clash between the two largest economies,
China and the United States.
Areas (in red) That Will Be Submerged by a Six-Meter
Sea Level Rise
Source: NASA
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193
There is, of course, nothing inevitable about such a clash. Indeed, the
consequences would be so dire as to make such a conflict almost unimagi-
nable. Yet the structural conditions of our age pose an obvious risk. China
is a rising power that will end America’s recent status as the sole super-
power. As the political scientist Graham Allison has noted, historical cases
in which a dominant power has been challenged by a rising power have
raised the risks of conflict.11 Either the dominant power (in the current
case, the United States) attacks the rising power (in this case, China) to
put down a competitive challenge “before it’s too late,” or the rising power
peremptorily attacks the dominant power out of fear of otherwise being
blocked on its path of growth. These threats ring true. Already, many U.S.
politicians speak of China as an inherent threat to U.S. interests, or to U.S.
“primacy,” while China not unreasonably views the United States as trying
to “contain” China’s progress.
If history provides lessons, it is to think the unthinkable, and then to
work assiduously to head off the worst cases. China and the United States
are already circling each other warily, each believing the worst of the other.
Some Chinese strategists believe that the United States will never accept
a strong and powerful China, while some American strategists believe that
China is out for world conquest. Both of these views are far too deter-
ministic and pessimistic. We should be endeavoring to cultivate the condi-
tions for trust and peace between these two nations, and indeed among the
world’s major powers, rather than standing by and putting our bets on war.
How to cultivate peace in the twenty-first century is one of the core ques-
tions of the next and final chapter.
Some Lessons from the Digital Age
The very success of economic growth in the Digital Age has laid sev-
eral traps for an unwary world. The world economy is producing vast
wealth, but failing in three other dimensions of sustainable development.
Inequalities are soaring, in part because of the differential effects of digital
technologies on high-skilled and low-skilled workers. Environmental deg-
radation is rampant, a reflection of a global economy that has reached nearly
$100 trillion in annual output without taking care to ensure that the impacts
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194
on the planet are kept to a safe and sustainable level. And the risk of con-
flict is rising, especially given the rapid shifts in geopolitics, and the anxiet-
ies that are being created in the US, China, and elsewhere.
All is not lost—not by a longshot. Humanity has the low-impact tech-
nologies (such as renewable energy and precision agriculture) and the
policy knowhow needed to head off the environmental crises. We also
have the benefit of global experience, if we choose to use it, to redistribute
income from the rich to the poor, while finding diplomatic solutions to
rising geopolitical tensions. We even have a new globally agreed approach
to governance—sustainable development—that can provide a roadmap
for action. The next and final chapter looks forward to see how we can
achieve the goals of prosperity, social justice, environmental sustainability,
and peace, that all the world has adopted.
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Each age of globalization has given rise to new tensions and wars. In the Paleolithic Age, Homo sapiens drove to extinction the other homi-nins, Neanderthals and Denisovans, they encountered. In the Neo- lithic Age, migrating herdsmen and farmers replaced the hunter-gatherers
they encountered, perhaps violently, in competition for scarce resources. In
the Equestrian Age, horsemen from the steppes raided and plundered the
temperate-zone societies of Eurasia. In the Classical Age, great land empires
battled for domination of Eurasia. In the Ocean Age, European conquer-
ors largely replaced the indigenous populations of the Americas, who were
driven to near elimination by disease and subjugation. In the Industrial Age,
European imperialists fought their way to political rule over most of Africa
and much of Asia. Today we are again in flux, as the Anglo-American-led
world gives way to something else yet to be determined.
Each age has also invented new forms of governance, and that can give
us hope. The Paleolithic Age forged the strong bonds of local nomadic clans.
The Neolithic Age brought village life and local politics. The Equestrian Age
brought the first states. The Classical Age brought the first multi-ethnic
empires. The Ocean Age brought ocean-spanning global empires. The Indus-
trial Age brought the beginnings of global governance, including the birth of
the United Nations, as well as two hegemonic powers, the United Kingdom
9 Guiding Globalization in the
Twenty-First Century
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196
and the United States. Now, the Digital Age calls on us to invent more effec-
tive ways to govern a globally interconnected world.
In the previous chapter, I outlined three enormous challenges for the
Digital Age: rising inequality, massive environmental degradation, and the
risks arising from major geopolitical change. These daunting challenges
could overload our political institutions and provoke a devastating conflict.
Such has been the pattern of the past. Surely the prime task of our age is to
resist a slide toward war, as our capacity for mutual destruction exceeds any
past limits of history. And while maintaining the peace, our goals must also
include keeping the planet habitable and our societies inclusive and just.
More than ever, we need to manage globalization with these large goals
in mind. Several concepts can help us. The first is sustainable development,
meaning the holistic approach to governance that combines economic,
social, and environmental objectives. The second is the social-democratic
ethos, meaning an inclusive and participatory approach to political and
economic life. The third is subsidiarity, meaning that we solve problems at
the proper level of governance. The fourth is a reformed United Nations.
The fifth is a world safe for diversity.
Sustainable Development
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith largely defined the ethos of the
Industrial Age: the quest for national wealth. Since the early nineteenth
century, sovereign governments have competed for wealth and power
through industrialization and technological advancement. A global-scale
market economy emerged in which privately owned companies aggres-
sively pursue profits on a global scale. The result has been two centuries
of economic growth, albeit punctuated by wars and economic crises. The
world economy today is at least one hundred times larger than at the start
of the Industrial Age. With annual growth in world output averaging
around 3 percent, the world economy continues to double in size roughly
every twenty years, that is, in a single generation.
This economic growth has produced startling gains in living standards
and has brought the end of extreme poverty within reach. But it has also
generated two stark results. First, inequalities of income and wealth are
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197
intense and increasing. Not only do we still have extreme poverty in the
midst of global wealth; we also have rising inequalities within rich societies
that threaten to become much worse in the age of smart machines. Second,
we have violated the planetary boundaries with human-induced climate
change, loss of biodiversity, and pervasive pollution that threaten the well-
being of billions of people and the survival of millions of species.
The key to wellbeing, therefore, is a combination of objectives—not
just the pursuit of wealth, but the combination of prosperity, lower levels
of inequality, and environmental sustainability. The triple bottom line of
economic, social, and environmental objectives is the concept of sustainable
development. It must be the essential vision for our time. The equivalent of
Adam Smith’s text for this century should be “The Sustainable Develop-
ment of Nations.”
Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, prime minister of Norway in the 1980s,
brought the new concept of sustainable development to the world’s atten-
tion through the Commission on Environment and Development that
she chaired. In the commission’s 1987 report, Our Common Future, sustain-
able development was defined as development that “meets the needs of the
present generation without compromising the ability of future generations
to meet their own needs.”1 The new concept was adopted by the UN mem-
ber states at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development
in Rio de Janeiro, otherwise known as the Rio Earth Summit.
At the time, the Rio Earth Summit was heralded as a definitive break-
through for global governance. It produced three major environmental
agreements—on climate change, biodiversity conservation, and the fight
against the spread of deserts. The UN member states adopted the con-
cept of sustainable development and a road map for its implementation
known as Agenda 21. Yet the follow-up results were distressingly small. The
environmental treaties were not effectively implemented. Human-induced
global warming continued unabated; the destruction of biodiversity accel-
erated; and the spread of degraded lands and desertification in the world’s
drylands continued apace.
At a follow-up conference in 2012, on the twentieth anniversary of the
Rio Earth Summit, the world’s governments reconvened and surveyed the
global landscape with dismay. Environmental degradation was running out
of control, and Agenda 21, the purported guidebook for sustainable devel-
opment, had fallen into the void. The concept of sustainable development
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198
was more urgent than ever, but new means had to be found to bring it to
the forefront of public policy. In that context, the governments decided to
launch a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to bring sustain-
able development to the forefront of daily politics, civil-society activism,
and the strategies of the business sector.
Between 2012 and 2015, the UN member states negotiated the SDGs,
which culminated in adoption of the seventeen SDGs shown in figure 9.1
as part of an agreed 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The con-
cept of sustainable development was somewhat recast from its original for-
mulation. Now, instead of emphasizing the harmonization of present and
future needs, as in the Brundtland Commission report, sustainable devel-
opment is now described as meeting the triple bottom line of economic
prosperity, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability.
The seventeen goals, and the accompanying 169 detailed targets,
are time-bound and quantifiable objectives (mostly) for the year 2030,
embodying various economic, social, and environmental objectives.
The main economic objectives are to end extreme poverty (SDG 1) and
UN Sustainable Development Goals
Source: United Nations Department of Global Communications.
“Sustainable Development Goals.” 2019.
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199
hunger (SDG 2), ensure universal health coverage (SDG 3) and schooling
(SDG 4), and provide access to safe water (SDG 6), electricity (SDG 7),
decent jobs (SDG 8), and modern infrastructure (SDG 9). The social
objectives include gender equality (SDG 5), reduced inequality of income
(SDG 10), and peaceful, lawful and inclusive societies (SDG 16). The envi-
ronmental objectives include sustainable cities (SDG 11), sustainable pro-
duction and consumption (SDG 12), control of climate change (SDG 13),
and the protection of marine ecosystems (SDG 14) and terrestrial ecosys-
tems (SDG 15). The final goal, SDG 17, calls for a global partnership to
accomplish the first sixteen SDGs.
To find the ways to achieve these seventeen goals, we need to look to the
future in a systematic and rational manner. Most importantly, we need a
kind of dynamic and adaptive planning—that is, planning with an explicit
account of uncertainty that allows for updating of policies and strategies
along the way. Because we do not know with precision what the technol-
ogies of the future will offer, we can plan ahead but not rigidly. In this
regard, we should consider the very wise statement of President Dwight
D. Eisenhower, who served as the supreme allied commander in World
War II. Eisenhower liked to say that “plans are useless, but planning is
everything.” He meant that specific plans will not be followed in practice
because unexpected circumstances will surely arise, yet planning—the logi-
cal process of looking ahead in a systematic manner—is crucial for success.
Part of successful planning will be multidimensional systems thinking.
We have to integrate our understanding of agriculture, healthcare, land use,
carbon management, energy systems, and biodiversity conservation. For
example, we will have to reconsider land use in order to accomplish several
simultaneous objectives: food security, biodiversity conservation, the bio-
logical storage of carbon to fight climate change, and economic wellbeing
of rural communities. This will require multidimensional systems thinking.
To plan successfully, the world will need an active interchange of ideas,
global cooperation in research and development, and the rapid dissemina-
tion of best practices across countries. At a time when there are so many
centers of excellence in learning, there will be huge advantages of global
knowledge networks on the various dimensions of sustainable development.
The global research agenda should adopt the concept of directed technical
change, meaning that R&D efforts should be targeted toward goals of high
priority, such as low-cost and plentiful zero-carbon energy, biodegradable
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200
waste products, food crops that are resilient to environmental stresses, more
efficient means of irrigation, and better climate modeling and forecasts.
Governance for sustainable development will require a tremendous
amount of consensus building. That will be hard work. Vested interests
and diverse perspectives and cultures often make it difficult to achieve a
national much less a global consensus on how to make needed changes—
for example, on energy systems, land use, and urban planning. Multi-
stakeholder deliberations and consensus building efforts will be needed to
implement the good ideas that arise through research and development.
We will also need to hold governments and businesses accountable for
their commitments to the SDGs. That kind of accountability will depend
on accurate and timely metrics to track progress on the SDGs. Investors
too will need to be held accountable for directing new investment funds
toward sustainable projects. Fortunately, “ESG Investing,” meaning the use
of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) indicators in investment
allocations, is on the rise. In fact, all investments in the future should satisfy
ESG standards.
Finally, we need excitement and inspiration. Sustainable development
must be our generation’s moonshot—a galvanizing adventure that draws
forth the talents, resources, and energies to get the job done. I can recall
from my youth the thrill of the moonshot, when U.S. President John F.
Kennedy called on Americans to back a space adventure of high risk and
daring. In May 1961, President Kennedy declared, “I believe that this nation
should commit itself to achieving the goal before the decade is out of land-
ing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single
space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more
important for the long-range exploration of space. And none will be so
difficult or expensive to accomplish.” Those riveting words set the United
States on the path to the moon. President Kennedy’s goal was accom-
plished a mere eight years later.
The future trajectory of the world’s population will also make a differ-
ence. According to the most recent UN forecasts, the world population in
2100 might be anywhere between 7 billion and 16 billion people, depend-
ing on the future path of fertility rates (figure 9.2). Sustainable develop-
ment will be vastly harder to achieve if the world population soars to 10
billion or more. The low-population trajectory, fortunately, is the one we
would expect if we honor the commitments to healthcare for all (SDG 3),
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201
education for all (SDG 4), and gender equality (SDG 5). That combina-
tion would mean that both girls and boys will stay in school longer, marry
later, join the labor force in greater numbers, and voluntarily choose to have
smaller families, while investing more in the health, nutrition, and educa-
tion of each child. That so-called demographic transition would lead to a
peaking of the world population in this century of perhaps 9 billion, a faster
reduction in poverty, and far less adverse stress on the natural environment
than if the world population continues to rise throughout the century to
more than 10 billion.
Social-Democratic Ethos
The 193 UN member states are pursuing sustainable development with
widely varying degrees of consistency and commitment. Some countries
are on track to achieve most or all of the SDGs, including the decarboniza-
tion of their energy systems and reduced levels of inequality. Others con-
tinue on the path of highly polluting fossil fuels and growing inequality.
Low, Medium and High Fertility Projections
Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division
(2019). World Population Prospects 2019, Online Edition
Medium fertility High fertility Low fertility
0.0
19 50
19 55
19 60
19 65
19 70
19 75
19 80
19 85
19 90
19 95
20 00
20 05
20 10
20 15
20 20
20 25
20 30
20 35
20 40
20 45
20 50
20 55
20 60
20 65
20 70
20 75
20 80
20 85
20 90
20 95
21 00
5.0
10.0
15.0
Po p
u la
ti o
n (b
ill io
n s)
20.0
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202
An examination of the relative progress and commitment of different
countries can provide evidence of “what works” to achieve the SDGs.
The countries in the global forefront of achieving the SDGs are the
countries of northern Europe. In 2019, the ranking of countries accord-
ing to SDG progress showed that the world’s top five countries were
Denmark, Sweden, Finland, France, and Austria.2 Interestingly, the 2019
rankings of countries by their self-reported levels of life satisfaction (“sub-
jective wellbeing”) were similar: Finland, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and
the Netherlands.3 Indeed, when we compare the full rankings of SDG
achievement and the rankings of life satisfaction, we find a strong degree
of correlation, with the countries of northern Europe at the top of both
sets of world rankings.
The key to this dual success in sustainable development and life satisfac-
tion is a long-standing style of governance and social ethos in the north-
ern European countries. The top-ranked countries all share a philosophy
of “social democracy,” including long periods during the past century in
which social-democratic political parties led the governments of these
nations. In this context, a social-democratic ethos signifies a set of ideas
for organizing politics and the economy. These include a commitment to
a market economy with private ownership combined with a high level of
worker unionization, labor rights, a healthy work-life balance (including
paid family leave and ample vacation time), and the universal provision of
public services, including quality healthcare and education financed by the
budget. This strategy has sometimes been called “the middle way” between
free-market capitalism on one side and state ownership of industry on the
other side. By all accounts, this middle way produces the most successful
combination of prosperity, social inclusion, and environmental sustainabil-
ity of any political-economic system on the planet today.
The social-democratic ethos will become even more important during
the Digital Age as more and more jobs are displaced by smart machines.
Workers with more job skills, typically requiring more education, will
find that their jobs are empowered by the smart machines, while work-
ers with lesser skills will be displaced by the machines. The result will be a
further increase in earnings inequality and economic insecurity for lower-
skilled workers. In order to ensure that all parts of society benefit from
the ongoing technological advances, public policies will have to tax the
“winners” and use the proceeds to ensure universal access to quality
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203
healthcare, education, and social protection as a matter of human right—
the core idea of the social-democratic ethos.
Subsidiarity and the Public Sphere
A key to good policy making is the distinction between private goods and
public goods. Private goods are goods that the marketplace efficiently pro-
vides under the incentives of profit maximization. Public goods are those
that the marketplace underprovides because the profit motive will send
the wrong signals. Public goods include quality education and healthcare
for all, new scientific knowledge, access to new technologies, protection of
the environment, and infrastructure such as highways and long-distance
transmission lines for electric power. Private goods (such as housing, fur-
nishings, automobiles, personal appliances, tourism, etc.) operate mostly on
a market basis, with households generally spending their own incomes to
purchase goods from profit-oriented businesses. Public goods, by contrast,
are typically provided through public budgets, with government revenues
covering the costs of public investments and services.
A major policy challenge is to set the right boundaries between the pri-
vate and public sectors, and between the public sectors at varying political
scales. Some public goods are local, meaning that they can be effectively
provided by local governments, such as cities or towns. Schools, clinics,
police protection, and local roads are all examples of local public goods.
Other public goods are national in character, such as national defense or
a national highway system. Still other public goods are transnational or
regional, including at least two countries, such as the management of a
river that runs through several countries. Matters such as the diversion
of river flows, flood control, hydroelectric power, and navigation rights
along the riverway are all public goods that should generally be handled
by a transnational authority with representatives from all of the affected
countries. Still other public goods are continental in scale, such as major
transport systems (highways and railways throughout Europe and Asia),
long-distance power transmission lines, transboundary pollution control,
and the protection of biodiversity and ecosystems shared by many nations
(such as the Amazon Basin, with nine countries having territory in the
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204
basin). A growing number of public goods are global in nature, such as the
end of human-induced climate change, the control of epidemic diseases,
development assistance for the poorest countries, the crackdown on inter-
national tax evasion, and nuclear non-proliferation.
The doctrine of subsidiarity provides an important framework for the
provision of public goods. It holds that the provision of public goods (and
services) should be managed at the lowest scale of governance feasible for
the particular goods and services in question. When the goods and services
can be effectively left to the marketplace, it is good to do so. For those goods
that are inherently public in nature, it is best to provide them at the most
local level of governance feasible. National governments could in principle
be put in charge of operating schools and clinics, for example, but there is
usually no compelling case to do so, as schools and clinics can be provided
effectively by local governments taking into account the specific needs of
each local community. Local governance enables more local participation in
decision making by the people directly affected and more attention to local
conditions. At the same time, it does not make sense to assign local govern-
ments to provide services or solve problems that can only be addressed at a
larger geographical scale, such as rivershed management or the control of
transboundary pollution. Those problems require transnational authorities.
Similarly, it would be impossible to control human-induced climate change
by the disaggregated efforts of individual cities or even nations, without
the benefit of an overarching global framework, namely the UN Frame-
work Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Climate
Agreement, both of which include all nations of the world.4
The failure to understand the subsidiarity doctrine leads to endless con-
fusion in public policies. Some free-market ideologists, for example, object
to the government’s role in the economy without appreciating the dif-
ference between private and public goods. Advocates of local governance
often fail to realize that certain public goods cannot be provided by local
governments alone. Nationalists who are opposed to global treaties and UN
regulations often assume that all necessary public goods can be provided by
national governments, without reflecting on the realities of transboundary
challenges such as transnational infrastructure and global environmental
management of challenges such as climate change.
In the twenty-first century, many dimensions of sustainable develop-
ment will require public goods on a multi-country or global scale. Rivers,
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205
ecosystems, pollution, climate control, international financial flows, the
Internet, power transmission, highway systems, railroad networks, and
aviation all require strong regional and global cooperation. None can be
managed effectively at the level of a single country. Regional groupings of
nations, such as the European Union, the African Union, ASEAN, Merco-
sur, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Regional Comprehensive
Economic Partnership (in Asia), and others, will be even more important
in the future than they are today.
China has been promoting large-scale transnational cooperation in
infrastructure in two major initiatives. The first is the Belt and Road Ini-
tiative (BRI), to provide land-based infrastructure for the “belts” connect-
ing Asia and Europe, and for the sea “roads” connecting Asia, Europe,
and Africa through the Indian Ocean. The second is the Global Energy
Interconnection (GEI) initiative led by an organization called GEIDCO
(Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Orga-
nization). GEI aims to connect high-quality sites of renewable energy
(wind, solar, and hydro) around the world through long-distance power
transmission. Both BRI and GEI are creative approaches to governance of
transboundary infrastructure for the twenty-first century. Indeed, the two
initiatives should be combined, since the BRI should be based on renew-
able energy if it is to serve the true interests of the countries involved and
of the world. Figure 9.3 shows a map of the existing and planned infra-
structure the Belt and Road Initiative entails.
As regional public goods rise in importance, regional groupings such
as the European Union, the African Union, and ASEAN will become
even more important than they are today. We can imagine that twenty-
first-century governance will increasingly involve cooperation among
multi-national groups rather than between individual nations. We can
suppose that there will be eight major regional groupings: North America,
South America, European Union, African Union, South Asia, East Asia,
Commonwealth of Independent States, and Western Asia. These eight
regional groupings could begin to constitute the core of global diplomacy.
Currently, the UN is an organization of individual member states, now
totaling 193 countries. With 193 countries, there are more than 18,000
pairwise combinations of countries. With eight regions, there are only
twenty-eight pairwise combinations of regions, a much more manageable
number for effective international cooperation.
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207
Reforming the United Nations
As historian Mark Mazower describes in his important intellectual history
Governing the World, the idea of global governance first took hold among
the intellectual leaders of the European Enlightenment.5 The German
philosopher Immanuel Kant foresaw a “perpetual peace” on the basis of a
global confederation of republics. After the Napoleonic Wars, the conserva-
tive states of Europe entered into the Concert of Europe to try to maintain
peace and stability, and especially to avoid revolutionary ideas such as par-
liamentary democracy and republicanism. In the second half of the nine-
teenth century, the European powers collaborated to avoid conflicts among
themselves as they incorporated large swathes of Africa and Asia into their
respective empires. They also established new international institutions to
govern the increasingly interconnected world, including the International
Telegraph Union (1865) and the International Postal Union (1874).
The first comprehensive attempt at global governance among the
world’s nation-states came in the wake of World War I with the estab-
lishment of the League of Nations, heaquartered in Geneva, in 1920. The
League was a remarkable breakthrough in concept, giving representation to
nations in order to maintain the peace. There were forty-two initial mem-
bers, later joined by another twenty-one countries. Though the League was
established at the behest of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, the United
States itself did not join because of opposition in the Senate. Without the
United States, and in the face of unremitting financial and political turmoil
in Europe and neighboring Western Asia and Africa, the League proved
unable to respond to the growing geopolitical and socioeconomic crises of
the 1930s. With the outbreak of World War II, the League’s technical staff
mostly transferred to the United States. The League itself was dissolved in
1946, its functions taken over by the new United Nations.
The term United Nations was originally applied to the anti-fascist alli-
ance in World War II led by the United States, the United Kingdom, and
the Soviet Union. It then became the appellation for the successor body to
the League of Nations. The new United Nations organization was estab-
lished in 1945 under the UN Charter and assumed its home in New York
City the following year. The moral charter of the UN, the Universal Decla-
ration of Human Rights, was adopted in 1948.
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208
As I recounted briefly in the previous chapter, the UN represented the
internationalist side of post–World War II U.S. foreign policy. The United
States strongly supported its creation from the 1940s through the 1960s, for
three main reasons. First, it could be used as an instrument to advance U.S.
foreign policy—for example, in the Korean War, where the United States
and its allies operated as a UN-mandated force. Second, the UN offered an
effective way to create a global agenda for economic development under
the aegis of the United States. Third, the UN offered an important venue
for the United States to compete with the Soviet Union for the “hearts and
minds” of the newly independent postcolonial states.
As the power, voice, and influence of the developing countries increased
at the UN, and as the competition with the Soviet Union waned toward
the end of the Cold War, the U.S. attitude toward the UN became ambiva-
lent and at times hostile. When the developing countries called for a New
International Economic Order (NIEO) in the 1970s, the United States
opposed the NIEO and instead demanded that the countries fall into
line with the U.S.-led global capitalist system. Since the 1990s, the United
States has become increasingly resistant to ceding authority to UN initia-
tives, and a growing number of UN treaties have been left unsigned or
unratified by the US.
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 vic-
torious allied powers (the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and United
States, together with France and China) were given special status as the
five permanent members of the UN Security Council. These P5 countries
not only were granted permanent seats on the Security Council but were
also accorded a veto over its decisions and over subsequent changes in the
UN Charter.
The problem, of course, is that the world has changed significantly since
1945, when the United States reigned supreme. The P5 countries are no lon-
ger the decisive forces in geopolitics, and no longer the obvious candidates
for extraordinary privilege in global governance. One way to see that is in
table 9.1, which measures the “size” of countries according to their share
of world population and world output. For purposes of the calculations,
a nation’s share of world output is defined as the simple average of two
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209
measures: its share of world output measured at market prices and its share
measured at purchasing-power-adjusted prices.
The table shows the ten largest countries as of 2018. While all of the P5
countries are among the ten largest countries, three of the P5—the UK,
France, and Russia—are in fact smaller than five other countries: India,
Japan, Germany, Brazil, and Indonesia. The allocation of permanent seats
on the Security Council represents decisions taken in 1945 rather than
today’s realities. Note that three of the five large countries without perma-
nent seats are in Asia: India, Japan, and Indonesia.
The UN Security Council currently has fifteen members, the P5 plus ten
rotating seats with two-year terms and no veto power. The rotating mem-
bers are elected by five regional groupings: Asia (two seats), Latin Amer-
ica (two seats), Africa (three seats), Western Europe and Others Group
(WEOG) (two seats), and Eastern Europe (one seat). Thus, combining
the permanent and rotating members, Asia currently holds three seats,
or a mere 20 percent of the Security Council, despite having 60 percent
of the world’s population and accounting for nearly 50 percent of the
world’s GDP. The underrepresentation of Asia on the UN Security
Table
China 17.2 18.7 17.9
United States 19.7 4.4 12.0
India 5.5 17.9 11.7
Japan 5.0 1.7 3.3
Indonesia 1.9 3.5 2.7
Brazil 2.3 2.8 2.6
Germany 3.9 1.1 2.5
Russia 2.5 2.0 2.3
United Kingdom 2.8 0.9 1.8
France 2.7 0.9 1.8
Source: IMF World Economic Outlook, October 2019. Output share is the simple average of the share of
national output measured in world output at U.S. dollars and at international dollars.
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210
Council is one of the most glaring weaknesses of the UN system today.
The UN was designed for North Atlantic leadership, yet the global cen-
ter of gravity of population, economics, and geopolitics is shifting toward
Asia and Africa.
Table 9.2 presents a reform proposal that would help to rebalance
the UN Security Council. In my proposed reform, the Security Council
would expand to twenty-one members, with Asia holding six seats, or
around 30 percent. Six new permanent members would be added, the
large five underrepresented countries mentioned above (Brazil, Germany,
India, Indonesia, and Japan) plus Nigeria, Africa’s largest country. The
problem of course is that even this modest change would involve a rela-
tive diminution of power of the United States and the other P5 coun-
tries, which they can block by veto. In fact, reform of the UN Security
Council has been stymied for many years by exactly this problem, the
opposition of the P5 to needed reforms. And with its relative weakening
in the global scene, the United States may well seek to hobble rather than
reform the UN in the years ahead. Reform will come when the United
States and the other P5 members finally appreciate that a healthy and
vibrant UN is essential for global peace and security, including of the P5
countries themselves.
Table
Latin America and Caribbean
2 3 Brazil 2
Eastern Europe 2 2 Russia 1
Asia-Pacific 3 6 China, India, Japan, Indonesia
2
Africa 3 4 Nigeria 3
Western Europe and other groups
5 6 United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany
2
World Total 15 21 11 10
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211
Ethics in Action for a Common Plan
In his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis wrote:
Interdependence obliges us to think of one world with a common plan.
Yet the same ingenuity which has brought about enormous techno-
logical progress has so far proved incapable of finding effective ways
of dealing with grave environmental and social problems worldwide.
A global consensus is essential for confronting the deeper problems,
which cannot be resolved by unilateral actions on the part of individ-
ual countries. Such a consensus could lead, for example, to planning a
sustainable and diversified agriculture, developing renewable and less
polluting forms of energy, encouraging a more efficient use of energy,
promoting a better management of marine and forest resources, and
ensuring universal access to drinking water.6
The challenge of globalization from the earliest days of humanity has
been the lack of consensus. Our species, exquisitely evolved for cooperation
within our clan, is equally primed for conflict with the “other.” In a world
that has the ability to “end all forms of human poverty and all forms of
human life,” as President John F. Kennedy eloquently stated in his Inaugu-
ral Address, can we actively find a consensus for a common plan?
To take up Pope Francis’s challenge and explore the possibilities and
limits of consensus, I recently co-led in a multifaith effort to find the com-
mon basis for global action for sustainable development. Religious lead-
ers and practitioners across the world’s major faiths—Christianity, Shia
and Sunni Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and First Nation
beliefs—as well as secular philosophers, gathered over two years seeking
Ethics in Action for sustainable development. We asked ourselves: Is there
a common framework that could engage communities across the divisions
of faith, culture, race, and ethnicity?
Our answer, tentatively, is yes. The religious leaders repeatedly chastised
politicians for misusing religion in their cynical quest for power. Religious
beliefs are frequently misused and misquoted by politicians in order to
stoke fear and division. In fact, the religious leaders readily found common
ground on the key precepts of sustainable development. The challenge,
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212
then, is not an unbridgeable divide of human belief but rather the clash of
interests and ambitions. The problem is one of politics rather than irrecon-
cilable human differences.
The faith leaders and ethicists identified three moral precepts com-
mon to all of the world’s faiths. The first is the Golden Rule, the principle
of reciprocity: Do not do unto others what you would not have them
do to you. The Golden Rule is found in the teachings of Confucius and
of Jesus, in Hindu texts, and in Kant’s categorical imperative. The sec-
ond principle is the preferential option for the poor—that is, giving due
attention to the poorest members of society. Ethics consists in the protec-
tion of human dignity, and human dignity requires that each person in
society have the economic means to meet basic needs. In United Nations
parlance, it is “to leave no one behind.” The third precept is protection
of creation—the physical Earth on which our own survival, and that of
millions of other species, depends. These principles can be the building
blocks of a common global plan for sustainable development, if politics
does not get in the way.
Politics, indeed, has two faces. For the ancient Greek philosopher Aris-
totle, politics is the quest for the common good of the citizenry, the mem-
bers of the polis (the political community). Aristotle defined this as a quest
for eudaimonia (a flourishing life). For the Renaissance-era political theo-
rist Niccolò Machiavelli, by contrast, politics is the struggle for power by
the prince. Kant believed that global peace would be possible when princes
could no longer march their citizens off to war. Kant described war as a
plaything of princes who are not accountable to their subjects:
In a constitution which is not republican, and under which the subjects
are not citizens, a declaration of war is the easiest thing in the world to
decide upon, because war does not require of the ruler, who is the pro-
prietor and not a member of the state, the least sacrifice of the pleasures
of his table, the chase, his country houses, his court functions, and the
like. He may, therefore, resolve on war as on a pleasure party for the most
trivial reasons, and with perfect indifference leave the justification which
decency requires to the diplomatic corps who are ever ready to provide it.7
One hundred fifty years after Kant, an evil and cynical Nazi war leader,
Hermann Goering, while imprisoned at Nuremburg for Nazi war crimes,
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213
described how demagogues can use propaganda to launch wars—even, alas,
in democracies. Interviewed in his jail cell, he told his interviewer:
Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob
on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out
of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common
people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America,
nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the
leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple
matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist
dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.8
“There is one difference,” Goering’s interviewer pointed out. “In a democ-
racy the people have some say in the matter through their elected rep-
resentatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”
Goering replied:
Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always
be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do
is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack
of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way
in any country.
We are left, in the end, with a need, a hope, and a conundrum. The need
is to steer the new age of globalization so that our energies are directed
toward ending human poverty rather than human life. The hope is that
across the world’s societies and religions there are common ethical under-
pinnings. The conundrum is how easily we nonetheless fall prey to our
small differences, which can be stirred into virulent hatreds by demagogic
leaders in their quest for power.
I have mentioned many times one modern leader whose leadership
I admire and whose words continue to inspire. President Kennedy lived
through the closest brush with global nuclear annihilation that we have
ever experienced: the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In the wake of that hor-
rifically close call, Kennedy urged peace between the United States and the
Soviet Union and achieved a first step toward that peace by negotiating the
Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. In making the case for peace rather
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214
than war, Kennedy explained our common human interests in words that
still guide us today in managing our interdependent world:
So, let us not be blind to our differences—but let us also direct atten-
tion to our common interests and to the means by which those dif-
ferences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences,
at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final
analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small
planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future.
And we are all mortal.9
Globalization reflects the fundamental fact that the human journey,
from our common roots in Africa until today, has always been a shared
one. Our reality as a global species was not self-evident through most of
our history, because life seemed to be local and because other tribes, races,
and empires seemed to be implacable foes. Yet the great religions portrayed
a common origin and destiny of humanity, and today we can envision our
common fate more clearly than ever before in the images sent home daily
by orbital satellites mapping the Earth. Our common fate does not mean
homogeneity and an end of differences. It means a global society strength-
ened by distinctive cultures in a world made safe for diversity.
We are, as throughout our species’ long saga and adventure, facing the
interactions of geography, technology, and institutions. The great evolu-
tionary biologist E. O. Wilson is no doubt correct when he notes that we
have stumbled into the twenty-first century with our “Stone Age emotions,
medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” We are out of synch, out of
kilter. Yet we also have our capacities to reason and to cooperate, formed on
the African savanna more than a hundred thousand years ago. We have a
much clearer understanding today of our common interests. Our greatest
hope is to use the lessons of history and of our common human nature to
forge a new era of cooperation at the global scale.
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This book originated as a series of three lectures hosted by Profes-sor Gordon L. Clark at the Oxford School of Geography and the Environment in May 2017. I am most grateful to Prof. Clark and his colleagues and students for the warm hospitality, stimulating environment,
and insightful feedback on the ideas presented here.
In turning the lectures into this book, I am especially grateful to Ms. Ismini
Ethridge for her superb and comprehensive assistance in the research and
preparation of the manuscript. She carried this project forward at every stage,
and without her excellent support, the book simply could not have been writ-
ten. She has been very ably assisted in the home stretch by Ms. Juliana Bartels.
Prof. Gordon McCord at UC San Diego shared his insights, ideas,
and invaluable support of the geographic analysis. Of course, any and all
remaining errors are solely my own.
I am thrilled and grateful that Columbia University Press is once again
publishing my work. The Press’s great attention to detail, superb editorial
support, and constant encouragement are an author’s dream. I would like
particularly to thank Bridget Flannery-McCoy for her great confidence in
the project and Ms. Caelyn Cobb for her exceptional editorial support at
all stages of preparing the book.
My wife, Sonia Ehrlich Sachs, is an intellectual partner in every aspect of
my work and thinking and, as always, was indispensable for this book. Thank
goodness for her wisdom, infinite patience, and deep interest in the material.
Acknowledgments
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This appendix describes the major data sources used in the calculations,
graphs, and maps throughout the book.
Data Appendix
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218
Climate Zones
The climate classification used in this book is the Köppen-Geiger system,
which classifies the major world climate zones into five main categories
based on temperature and precipitation, and a sixth (highland) category
based on elevation.
A Equatorial climates
Af Equatorial rainforest, fully humid
Am Equatorial monsoon
As Equatorial savannah with dry summer
Aw Equatorial savannah with dry winter
B Arid climates
BS Steppe climate
BW Desert climate
C Warm temperate climates
Cs Warm temperate climate with dry summer
Cw Warm temperate climate with dry winter
Cf Warm temperate climate, fully humid
D Snow climates
Ds Snow climate with dry summer
Dw Snow climate with dry winter
Df Snow climate, fully humid
E Polar climates
ET Tundra climate
EF Frost climate
H Highland climates (varied)
Source: Markus Kottek, Jürgen Grieser, Christoph Beck, Bruno Rudolf, and Franz
Rubel, “World Map of the Köppen-Geiger climate classification updated,” Meteo-
rologische Zeitschrift 15, no. 3 (2006): 259–63. https://doi.org/10.1127/0941-2948
/2006/0130.
The GIS climate files used in this book were digitized from the climate-
zone map in A. Strahler, and A. H. Strahler. 1992. Modern Physical Geogra-
phy, 4th ed. New York: Wiley. The data set can be found at https://sites.hks
.harvard.edu/cid/ciddata/geog/gisdata.html.
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219
The Strahler and Strahler map, in turn, is based on:
R. Geiger and W. Pohl. 1954. Revision of the Köppen-Geiger Klimakarte
der Erde Erdkunde, Vol. 8: 58–61.
Since the climate has changed over time, projecting today’s climate map
back to conditions of past millennia is only an approximation.
Population Data
Historical Population Data
Much of the historical population data draws on Kees Klein Goldewijk,
Arthur Beusen, and Peter Janssen’s study on the HYDE 3.1 project data.
The study estimates “total and urban/rural population numbers, densi-
ties and fractions (including built-up area) for the Holocene, roughly the
period 10000 BCE to AD 2000 with a spatial resolution of 5 min longitude/
latitude.” Details may be found here:
Kees Klein Goldewijk, Arthur Beusen, and Peter Janssen. “Long-Term
Dynamic Modeling of Global Population and Built-up Area in a
Spatially Explicit Way: HYDE 3.1.” The Holocene 20, no. 4 (2010): 565–73.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0959683609356587.
World population, GDP and per capita GDP from 1–2008 CE
The historical economic data draw on the Maddison Project Database.
While this database has been adapted and updated during the last decade,
I chose to use the 2010 release version as it provides the most comprehen-
sive coverage by countries, regions and years. The 2010 dataset was the final
version provided by the late economic historian Angus Maddison himself,
covering world population, GDP and per capita GDP from 1 to 2008 CE.
For further information on the project see:
Maddison Project Database, version 2010. Jutta Bolt, Robert Inklaar,
Herman de Jong and Jan Luiten van Zanden (2010), “Rebasing
‘Maddison’: new income comparisons and the shape of long-run
economic development,” Maddison Project Working paper 10
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220
Gridded Population Data for 2015
The spatially explicit population data for 2015 is from the Center for
International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) Columbia
University. 2016. Gridded Population of the World, Version 4 (GPWv4):
Population Count. Palisades, NY: NASA Socioeconomic Data and Appli-
cations Center (SEDAC). http://dx.doi.org/10.7927/H4X63JVC.
Ancient Cities data
The data on ancient cities is based on Meredith Reba, Femke Reitsma, and
Karen C. Seto,“Spatializing 6,000 Years of Global Urbanization from 3700 BC
to AD 2000,” Scientific Data 3 (2016): 160034. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata
.2016.34. I deeply thank Dr. Reba for assistance in accessing these very
insightful data.
Data Used in the Creation of Maps and Geospatial Analysis
The maps draw on shapefiles from the following sources.
Coastal and river boundaries:
Made with Natural Earth, naturalearthdata.com. (Note that I apply present
data coastal and river boundaries to ancient civilizations. This is of course
only an approximation in view of changes in coastlines and river flows.)
Ancient Empire/Regional outlines:
worldmap.harvard.edu
Figure 5.2 Empire of Alexander the Great
http://awmc.unc.edu/awmc/map_data/shapefiles/cultural_data/political
_shading/alexander_extent/
Figure 5.3 Roman Empire
http://worldmap.harvard.edu/geoserver/wfs?outputFormat=SHAPE
-ZIP&service=WFS&request=GetFeature&format_options
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221
=charset 3AUTF-8&typename=geonode 3Aroman_empire_117_ce
_9sa&version=1.0.0
Figure 5.4 Han Dynasty
http://worldmap.harvard.edu/geoserver/wfs?outputFormat=SHAPE
-ZIP&service=WFS&request=GetFeature&format_options=charset
3AUTF-8&typename=geonode 3Aeastern_han_dynasty_in_73_ce
_lg4& version=1.0.0
Figure 5.6 Map of Silk Road
https://worldmap.harvard.edu/data/geonode:silk_road_8h3
Figure 5.8 Umayyad Empire
http://worldmap.harvard.edu/geoserver/wfs?outputFormat=SHAPE
-ZIP&service=WFS&request=GetFeature&format_options=charset
3AUTF-8&typename=geonode 3Aumayyad_caliphate_6ds&version
=1.0.0
Figure 5.9 Ottoman Empire
http://worldmap.harvard.edu/geoserver/wfs?outputFormat=SHAPE
-ZIP&service=WFS&request=GetFeature&format_options=charset
3AUTF-8&typename=geonode 3Aottomans_4ra&version=1.0.0
Figure 5.10 Song Dynasty
http://worldmap.harvard.edu/geoserver/wfs?outputFormat=SHAPE
-ZIP&service=WFS&request=GetFeature&format_options=charset
3AUTF-8&typename=geonode 3Asongdynasty_m0o&version=
1.0.0
Figure 5.12 Timurid Empire
http://worldmap.harvard.edu/geoserver/wfs?outputFormat=SHAPE
-ZIP&service=WFS&request=GetFeature&format_options=charset
3AUTF-8&typename=geonode 3Atimurid_empire_7s0&version=
1.0.0
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222
Tables
Throughout the text, I refer to seven continental regions, Africa (AF), Asia
(AS), Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Europe (EU), Latin
America (LA), North America (NA), and Oceania (OC). Note that for
purposes of analysis, the CIS is separated from Europe and Asia, but in
standard geographical accounts would be part of those two continents.
Following are supplementary tables that contain calculated data referred to
in the text.
Table a
3000 100 1400 2015
AF 9.7 36.8 37.8 25.9 25.2
AS 22.4 28.6 29.0 33.6 39.3
CIS 15.8 9.8 9.5 10.6 14.0
EU 51.3 56.1 52.0 45.0 50.6
LA 17.2 29.1 28.3 28.4 43.7
NA 29.5 26.8 31.4 41.4 49.4
OC 23.8 51.6 64.1 69.5 81.8
Total 20.0 32.4 32.6 32.8 38.0
Source: Author’s calculations using HYDE and CIESIN data. See Historical Population Data, Gridded
Population Data for 2015, and Data used in the Creation of Maps and Geospatial Analysis for details.
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Table
3000 100 1400 2015
AF 11.8 33.6 31.7 25.2 21.9
AS 17.9 29.5 29.6 32.2 28.6
CIS 18.9 35.0 31.6 34.2 38.7
EU 25.0 29.3 31.3 35.4 35.0
LA 17.0 27.3 26.3 26.3 21.4
NA 20.1 51.5 43.9 33.9 28.9
OC 4.3 13.3 11.9 11.1 8.9
Eurasia (AS+CIS+EU)
18.4 30.3 30.4 33.5 30.3
Total 16.3 30.1 29.9 31.1 27.7
Source: Author’s calculations using HYDE and CIESIN data. See Historical Population Data, Gridded
Population Data for 2015, and Data used in the Creation of Maps and Geospatial Analysis for details.
Table
3000 100 1400 2015
AF 20.0 60.5 59.2 45.4 42.1
AS 36.4 52.6 53.0 58.6 59.8
CIS 33.2 43.0 39.5 42.5 48.8
EU 69.0 76.4 74.5 71.3 74.0
LA 32.3 51.6 50.0 50.0 57.3
NA 46.8 70.9 67.9 68.6 68.6
OC 27.0 60.5 70.8 75.3 84.4
Total 33.8 56.3 56.2 57.1 58.0
Source: Author’s calculations using HYDE and CIESIN data. See Historical Population Data, Gridded
Population Data for 2015, and Data used in the Creation of Maps and Geospatial Analysis for details.
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Table
3000 100 1400 2015
AF 14.2 48.1 51.5 14.6 15.0
AS 57.8 73.3 70.6 63.1 56.8
CIS 10.1 49.1 47.6 27.9 32.2
EU 29.8 51.4 47.7 32.3 28.7
Total Old World 28.1 65.7 63.8 49.2 45.4
Source: Author’s calculations using HYDE and CIESIN data. See Historical Population Data, Gridded
Population Data for 2015, and Data used in the Creation of Maps and Geospatial Analysis for details.
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1. For a dazzling analysis of culture and behavior from the viewpoint of evolutionary
biology, see Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Liveright,
2012).
2. For a riveting accounting of these late-nineteenth-century famines, see Mike Davis,
Late Victorian Holocausts (Brooklyn: Verso, 2001).
3. Kees Klein Goldewijk, Arthur Beusen, and Peter Janssen, “Long-Term Dynamic
Modeling of Global Population and Built-up Area in a Spatially Explicit Way:
HYDE 3.1,” Holocene 20, no. 4 (2010): 565–73.
4. Extreme poverty signifies a level of deprivation at which basic human needs (nutri-
tious diet, safe water, sanitation, clothing, shelter, and so forth) are not ensured. The
World Bank has regularly established metrics to measure extreme poverty. The World
Bank’s current poverty line is per capita consumption at or below $1.90 per day mea-
sured in 2011 prices using purchasing-power parity (PPP) exchange rates. Academic
studies of poverty throughout history propose their own respective poverty lines for
coherence with the recent World Bank data.
5. For the scale of forager communities, see Tobias Kordsmeyer, Pádraig Mac Carron,
and R. I. M. Dunbar, “Sizes of Permanent Campsite Communities Reflect Con-
straints on Natural Human Communities,” Current Anthropology 58, no. 2 (2017):
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6. In fact, the replacement rate is slightly above 2 children per woman to account for the
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7. The official U.S. employment data for 2018 may be found at https://www.bls.gov/emp
/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm. Note that in the calculations in
Notes
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226
the text I have added “non-agricultural self-employed” to the tertiary sector. The total
sums to 99.9 because of rounding.
8. David McGee and Peter B. deMenocal, “Climatic Changes and Cultural Responses
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10. Adam Smith, An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [1776]
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11. For further information on the sources of these data and other data used throughout
the text, please see the data appendix at the end of the book.
12. Two leading economists, Ronald Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke, offer a deeply
informed global history of trade, technology, and warfare during the 1000 years from
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Second Millennium.
1. The Paleolithic period dates from the time that hominins first used stone tools,
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the Pleistocene epoch, some 11,700 years ago. The Paleolithic period is divided into
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7. Pita Kelekna, “The Politico-Economic Impact of the Horse on Old World Cultures:
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during the transition from the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic is Simon
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11. There remains considerable uncertainty and heated debate about the timing and meth-
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the timing, the number of waves of migration, and now even the question of whether
the new arrivals came over a land corridor, as long surmised, or perhaps instead by
boat along the coastline. Recent evidence that early migrants came by coastal waters
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12. Martin Sikora, Andaine Seguin-Orlando, Vitor C. Sousa, Anders Albrechtsen, Thor-
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no. 7 (2018): 446–47.
2. An excellent recent study of the change in living standards and health during the
transition to farming may be found in Alison A Macintosh, Ron Pinhasi, and Jay T
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228
Wittfogel argued that the need for major public works to control river flooding and
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this land area by continent are as follows: Africa, 18.1 percent; Asia, 66.2 percent; CIS,
9.4 percent; and Europe, 6.4 percent. For further data on climate and population in
the Lucky Latitudes, see the data appendix.
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the Spread of Equus Asinus into Southern Africa,” African Archaeological Review 34,
no. 1 (2017): 21–41.
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4. Rossel et al., “Domestication of the Donkey.”
5. Pita Kelekna, The Horse in Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
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6. Ralph W. Brauer, “The Camel and Its Role in Shaping Mideastern Nomad Societies,”
Comparative Civilizations Review 28, no. 28 (1993): 47.
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Global Urbanization from 3700 BC to AD 2000,” Scientific Data 3 (2016): 160034.
1. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (London: Routledge, 1953).
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Were Lost and Found (New York: Doubleday, 2019), 61.
3. L. Carrington Goodrich, A Short History of the Chinese People (New York: Courier,
2002), 31.
4. Pita Kelekna, The Horse in Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), 390.
5. Dieter Kuhn, The Age of Confucian Rule (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 29.
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Modeling of Global Population and Built-up Area in a Spatially Explicit Way:
HYDE 3.1,” The Holocene 20, no. 4 (2010): 565–73.
1. For a wonderful account of the voyages, see Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the
Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 (New York: Simon and Shus-
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2. Adam Smith, An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [1776]
(New York: Random House, 1937).
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7. A recent critical history of the East India Company carries a descriptive title, see
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Modeling of Global Population and Built-up Area in a Spatially Explicit Way:
HYDE 3.1,” Holocene 20, no. 4 (2010): 565–73.
11. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014), 85.
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13. Smith, Wealth of Nations.
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age structure for all nations since 1950 is provided by the UN Population Division,
accessible here: https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications
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the IMF in the World Economic Outlook database, https://www.imf.org/external
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2. For a captivating history of the British industrial revolution with a strong focus on
technological advances, including the steam engine, see the classic study by David
Landes, Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in West-
ern Europe from 1750 to the Present, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
3. Jutta Bolt, Robert Inklaar, Herman de Jong, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Rebas-
ing ‘Maddison’: New Income Comparisons and the Shape of Long-Run Economic
Development,” GGDC Research Memorandum 174, January 2018.
4. E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge University
Press, 2010).
5. For pioneering theoretical investigations of GPTs and economic growth, see Bresna-
han and Trajtenberg (1995) and Helpman (1998).
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(May 1998): 331–60.
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of Global Change,” in 6th Wave and Systemic Innovation for Finland: Success Factor for the
Years 2010–2050 Project. University of Turku: Finland Futures Research Centre, 2012.
8. Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2016).
9. Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic
Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 131.
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10. For estimates of illiteracy for India and other countries around 1950, see Statistical
Division of UNESCO, World Illiteracy Mid-Century: A Statistical Study” (1957);
for life expectancy, see the data of the UN Population Division, https://population
.un.org/wpp/Download/Standard/Mortality/.
11. See John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent, (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 198–99.
12. Bolt et al., “Rebasing ‘Maddison.’ ”
13. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace [1919] ( Jersey City, N.J.:
Start Kindle Edition, 2014).
14. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
15. David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the
World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015); Nick Turse, “U.S. Military Says It Has
a ‘Light footprint’ in Africa,” The Intercept, December 1, 2018, https://theintercept
.com/2018/12/01/u-s-military-says-it-has-a-light-footprint-in-africa-these-documents
-show-a-vast-network-of-bases/.
16. Defense Manpower Data Center, “DoD Personnel, Workforce Reports & Publica-
tions,” DMDC.osd.mil: USA.gov, 2019.
17. The most recent estimate by the World Bank is 736 million in extreme poverty in 2015,
down from 1.85 billion in 1990. See “Poverty: Overview,” https://www.worldbank.org
/en/topic/poverty/overview, accessed November 11, 2019.
1. World Economic Forum, “How Much Data is Generated Each Day?,” April 17, 2019, https://
www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/how-much-data-is-generated-each-day-cf4bddf29f/.
2. Data as of November 20, 2019, from the following sources: Facebook log-ons, “The Top
20 Valuable Facebook Statistics—Updated November 2019,” https://zephoria.com
/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/; Google searches, https://www.internet livestats
.com/google-search-statistics/; YouTube videos, Omnicore, “YouTube by the Numbers:
Stats, Demographics & Fun Facts,” September 5, 2019, https://www.omnicoreagency
.com/youtube-statistics/; Internet users, Internet World Stats, “Top 20 Countries
in Internet Users vs. Rest of the World—June 30, 2019,” https://www.internetworld
stats.com/top20.htm; Swift settlements, swift.com, “The SWIFT-CLS Partner-
ship in FX Reduces Risk and Adds Liquidity,” April 4, 2019, https://www.swift.com
/news-events/news/the-swift-cls-partnership-in-fx-reduces-risk-and-adds-liquidity.
3. See David Silver, Thomas Hubert, Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Mat-
thew Lai, and Arthur Guez, et. al., “Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a
General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm,” arXiv.org (2017).
4. Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (New York:
Penguin, 2006).
5. World Bank, Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle
(Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2018), http://documents.worldbank.org/curated
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232
/en/104451542202552048/Poverty-and-Shared-Prosperity-2018-Piecing-Together
-the-Poverty-Puzzle.
6. The World Bank reports that China is on track to end poverty according to the
national definition of rural poverty (per capita rural net income of RMB 2,300 per
year in 2010 constant prices). See https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/china
/overview, accessed November 15, 2019.
7. The data are for China’s GDP at constant prices from the IMF World Economic
Outlook database, October 2019.
8. Data from World Intellectual Property Corporation, “World Intellectual Property
Report 2018,” https://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/pressroom/en/documents/pr
_2018_816_annexes.pdf#annex1.
9. See the report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and
Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 2019, https://ipbes.net/system/tdf/ipbes_7_10_add.1_en
_1.pdf ?file=1&type=node&id=35329.
10. For the intellectual history of this equation, see Marian R. Chertow, “The IPAT
Equation and Its Variants,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 4, no. 4 (2000), 13–29.
11. See Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s
Trap? (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).
1. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
2. The SDG rankings are available in the UN report by Jeffrey Sachs, Guido Schmidt-
Traub, Christian Kroll, Guillaume Lafortune, and Grayson Fuller, Sustainable Develop-
ment Report 2019: Transformations to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (New York:
Bertelsmann Stiftung and Sustainable Development Solutions Network [SDSN], 2019).
3. The life satisfaction rankings can be cound in the 2019 world happiness report: John
F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey D. Sachs, The UN World Happiness Report
2019. (New York: SDSN, 2019).
4. In 2019, President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United
States from the Paris Climate Agreement but not from the UNFCCC.
5. Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New
York: Penguin, 2013).
6. Pope Francis, Laudato si’ (Vatican City: Vatican Press, 2015), sec. 23.
7. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch [1795] (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1970).
8. G. M. Gilbert, interview with Hermann Goering, April 18, 1946, in Nuremberg Diary
(New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1947), 278.
9. John F. Kennedy, “Commencement Address at American University,” Washington,
D.C., June 10, 1963, https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy
-speeches/american-university-19630610.
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Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World.
Brooklyn: Verso, 2001.
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York: Norton, 1997.
Jared Diamond’s book is a masterpiece of concision, insight, and sheer joy of discovery.
He explains beautifully the deep role of physical geography in shaping our world.
Kordsmeyer, Tobias L., Pádraig Mac Carron, and R. I. M. Dunbar. “Sizes of Permanent
Campsite Communities Reflect Constraints on Natural Human Communities.” Cur-
rent Anthropology 58, no. 2 (2017.): 289–94.
Morris, Ian. Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal
About the Future. New York: Picador, 2011
Ian Morris offers a fascinating and provocative account of the interactions of geography,
technology, and geopolitics in shaping globalization over millennia.
Wilson, Edward O. The Social Conquest of Earth. New York: Liveright, 2012.
Davis, Loren G., David B. Madsen, Lorena Becerra-Valdivia, Thomas Higham, David A.
Sisson, and Sarah M. Skinner. “Late Upper Paleolithic Occupation at Cooper’s Ferry,
Idaho, USA, ~16,000 Years Ago.” Science 365 (2019): 891–97.
van der Kaars, Sander, Gifford H. Miller, Chris S. M. Turney, Ellyn J. Cook, Dirk Nürn-
berg, Joachim Schönfeld, et. al. “Humans Rather than Climate the Primary Cause of
Pleistocene Megafaunal Extinction in Australia.” Nature Communications 8, no. 14142
(2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms14142.
Further Readings
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Bar-Yosef, Ofer. “The Upper Paleolithic Revolution.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31,
no. 1 (2002): 363–93. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085416.
Reich, David. Who We Are and How We Got Here. New York: Random House, 2018.
David Reich is a leader of the revolution in genomics that is untangling the history
of human populations and their migrations in prehistory. He presents a scintillating
account of the science and reveals recent findings.
Wilson, Edward O. Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies. New York: Liveright, 2019.
E. O. Wilson is the world’s greatest evolutionary biologist, our age’s leading heir to
Darwin, and the progenitor of many fundamental ideas about human nature, the
consilience of knowledge, and the interactions of culture and genetics in shaping our
behavior.
Macklin, Mark G, and John Lewin. “The Rivers of Civilization.” Quaternary Science
Reviews 114 (2015): 228–44.
Morris, Ian. Why the West Rules – for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal
About the Future. New York: Picador, 2011.
Pulleyblank, EG. “Karl S. Wittfogel: Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total
Power. New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1957. 60s.”
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 21, no. 3 (1958): 657–60.
Robinson, Andrew. The Story of Writing. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007.
Andrew Robinson’s account helps us understand “the Internet of 3000 BCE”—that is,
the breakthrough technologies of early writing systems that were fundamental in the
rise of civilizations across Eurasia.
Smith, Richard L. Premodern Trade in World History. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Richard Smith opens our eyes to the fundamental role and means of long-distance
trade in human prehistory and the way trade has long shaped societies.
Cunliffe, Barry. By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Barry Cunliffe offers a wonderful vision of the interaction of human biomes—settlements
of the steppes, desert, and oceans—in shaping early history.
Kelekna, Pita. The Horse in Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009.
Pita Kelekna has produced a remarkably comprehensive and authoritative study of the
role of the horse in early history and the implications of the absence of the domesticated
horse in the early Americas.
Peter Mitchell. “Why the Donkey Did Not Go South: Disease as a Constraint on the
Spread of Equus Asinus into Southern Africa.” African Archaeological Review 34, no. 1
(2017): 21–41. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10437-017-9245-3.
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Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. New York: Norton, 2015.
Leading classicist Mary Beard gives a fresh, vivid, and fascinating account of the rise of
the Roman Empire, a history that remains absolutely vital to understanding Western
history and the history of ideas of the past 2,500 years.
Harris, W. V. Roman Power: A Thousand Years of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2016.
W. V. Harris, one of the great modern historians of the Greco-Roman world, offers an
expert, detailed, and remarkably insightful account of the rise and decline of the Roman
Empire, including a vivid discussion of the interactions of politics, demography, military
technology, and culture.
Frankopan, Peter. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. New York: Knopf, 2017.
Peter Frankopan brilliantly elucidates the dynamics of Silk Road trade and the steppe
empires in world history.
Moller, Violet. The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were
Lost and Found. New York: Doubleday, 2019.
Violet Moller provides a scintillating account of how the knowledge of ancient Greece
and Rome was transmitted to the modern world through countless civilizations, includ-
ing the Arabs, Byzantines, Almohads, Venetians, and others.
Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopf, 2014.
Sven Beckert has written a brilliant and original account of perhaps the world’s first
truly transoceanic industry and the powerful forces of early modern capitalism, greed,
empire, and slaveholding that built it.
Dalrymple, William. The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an
Empire. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
Hugill, Peter J. World Trade Since 1431: Geography, Technology, and Capitalism. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Peter Hugill provides an extremely lucid account of the interactions of naval technology,
physical geography, and the institutions of global commerce.
Levathes, Louise. When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne,
1405–1433. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1994.
Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York: Knopf,
2005.
Mann, Charles C. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. New York: Random
House, 2011.
Charles Mann’s volumes aim to elucidate the profound changes for the entire world brought
about by Columbus’s discovery of the sea route from Europe to the Americas. Adam Smith
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declared this discovery one of the most important events of human history, and Mann’s
superb volumes help us understand Smith’s assessment with much deeper insight.
Parthasarathi, Prasannan. Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Diver-
gence, 1600–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Prasannan Parthasarathi provides an invaluable look at the rise of the British Empire
through the lens of India. The rise of the West was far from inevitable and far from fair.
Britain bested India’s leadership in early modern textile production and trade through
protectionism and force.
Landes, David. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in
Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Pollard, Sidney. Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe 1760–1970. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1981.
Sidney Pollard brilliantly describes the west-to-east diffusion of industrialization across
Europe during the two centuries after Watt’s steam engine and other British techno-
logical breakthroughs. This is a vivid story of the interactions of geography, technology,
and politics, both national and Europe-wide.
Statistical Division of UNESCO. World Illiteracy Mid-Century: A Statistical Study.
Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 1957.
Wrigley, E. A. Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2010.
E. A. Wrigley is a powerful historical voice making clear that coal truly changed every-
thing in the world economy, allowing humanity to break free of the constraints of the
“organic economy.” This is interpretive history at its finest.
Allison, Graham. Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
Chertow, Marian. “The IPAT Equation and Its Variants.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 4,
no. 4 (2000): 13–29.
Sachs, Jeffrey D. The Age of Sustainable Development. New York: Columbia University Press,
2015.
I cite my own book because in it I attempted to synthesize the lessons of countless
original works that aim to interpret our age as the interaction of pathbreaking technolo-
gies and deepening ecological and social crises.
Sachs, Jeffrey D. A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2018.
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237
There is certainly no shortage of excellent writing about our present global predicament,
in which rising geopolitical tensions are combined with growing ecological and demo-
graphic challenges (including aging, urbanization, and mass migration). My own brief
account is a plea to Americans to recognize that America should not aim for “primacy”
in the twenty-first century, but rather for global cooperation, the rule of law, and secu-
rity for all nations under the UN Charter.
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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.17 on Thu, 23 Jul 2020 01:44:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Allison, Graham. Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? New
York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
Almathen, Faisal, Pauline Charruau, Elmira Mohandesan, Joram M. Mwacharo, Pablo
Orozco-terWengel, Daniel Pitt, Abdussamad M. Abdussamad, et al. “Ancient and
Modern DNA Reveal Dynamics of Domestication and Cross-Continental Dispersal
of the Dromedary.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 24 (2016):
6707–12. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1519508113.
Andrade, Tony. The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in
World History. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Barros Damgaard, Peter de, Rui Martiniano, Jack Kamm, J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar, Guus
Kroonen, Michaël Peyrot, Gojko Barjamovic, et al. “The First Horse Herders and the
Impact of Early Bronze Age Steppe Expansions into Asia.” Science 360, no. 6396 (2018):
eaar7711. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aar7711.
Bar-Yosef, Ofer. “The Upper Paleolithic Revolution.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31,
no. 1 (2002): 363–93. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085416.
Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. New York: Norton, 2015.
Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopf, 2014.
Benítez-Burraco, A. “Commentary: Ancient Genomes Show Social and Reproductive
Behavior of early Upper Paleolithic Foragers.” Frontiers in Psychology 8, no. 2247 (2017).
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02247.
Bolt, J., R. Inklaar, H. de Jong, and J. L. van Zanden. “Rebasing ‘Maddison’: New Income
Comparisons and the Shape of Long-Run Economic Development.” GGDC Research
Memorandum 174 (2018).
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Page numbers in italics indicate figures or tables.
Abbasid Caliphate, 87
Achaemenid Empire, 74–75, 77
Achaemenid Persia, 66
Africa, 23, 33; diseases of, 152; European
empires dividing, 153; Europe’s
onslaught of, 151–52; farm animals of,
55; indigenous people and slaves from,
116–20; migration from, 34–35, 41; slave
trade from, 118, 118–19; tsetse-infested,
56; wild ass of, 58
Agenda 21, 197
agriculture, 3; in ecological zones, 45–46;
emergence of, 41–42, 42; horses used in,
65–66; in Neolithic Age, 5, 8; population
and, 135; sedentism leading to, 41; in
Song Dynasty, 90; sustainable, 13
air pollution, 187–88, 190, 190
Akkadian Empire, 66
Alexander the Great, 28, 65–66, 75–76, 76
Alexander VI (Spanish pope), 108–9
Alexandria, 70
algal blooms, 190, 191
algorithms, 174–75
Allison, Graham, 193
alluvial civilizations, 46–48
alpacas, 56, 61
AlphaGo (AI system), 176
Anatolia, migration from, 64
ancient urban centers, 67
Anglo-American hegemony, 130, 153–56
animal domestication, 54–56
animal husbandry, 50
anopheles gambiae (mosquito), 152
Anthony, Marc, 77
anti-fascist alliance, 207
anti-trade policy, of China, 97
Aquinas, Thomas, 78
Arab caliphates, 88
Aristotle, 69, 70, 75, 77, 212
artificial intelligence, 174, 175–76, 185
artificial neural networks, 174
Asia: climate and population in, 113;
East, 165; Europe’s divergence with,
144–45; fossil fuels polluting air of, 190;
migration from, 227n11; steppes of, 53;
trade control sought by, 107–8
Index
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250
Asian tigers, 180
Assyrian kingdom, 66
Athens, 74
Aurelius, Marcus, 84
automobiles, 141
Avars, 86
Axial Age, 70–72
Babylonian kingdom, 66
Bacon, Francis, 106
Bacon, Roger, 136
Battle of Plassey (1757), 148
Battle of Tours (732 CE), 87
Bayt-al-Hikmah (House of Wisdom), 78
Beckert, Sven, 120–21
Bell Labs, 173
Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), 205, 206
Beringian land bridge, 19
biodegradable waste products, 199–200
biodiversity, 17–18, 184, 188–89, 199
biology, 75
biomass burning, 190
Black Death, 92
blank-slate learning (tabula rasa), 176
Bolshevik Revolution, 113
book writings, 71
botany, 106
Boulton, Richard, 137
Boxer Rebellion, 147
BRI. See Belt and Road Initiative
Britain: China’s Opium War with, 146–47;
coal access of, 137, 143; Egypt controlled
by, 154; energy consumption of, 133–34;
France’s war with, 123; global empire
of, 109; India rule by, 148–49; Industrial
Age entered by, 133; industrialization
of, 135–38, 142–43, 155; military
confrontation used by, 109; naval
power of, 112; per capita GDP in, 141;
textile industry of, 121; U.S. economic
dominance with, 154
British East India Company, 108, 110, 120,
148
British Empire, 112, 154–55
Bronze age, 3, 61
Brundtland, Gro Harlem, 197
bubonic plague, 49
Buddha, 69–71
Bulgar group, 65, 86
Bush, Vannevar, 160
bytes, 169
Byzantine Empire, 85–88, 86
camelids, 55, 60–61
camels, 55, 60–61
cannon artillery, 29
Cape Verde islands, 108
capitalism, 107–8, 115–16, 120–21, 151
carbon dioxide (CO2), 102–3, 184
carbon storage, 199
Caribbean, 117–18
de las Casas, Bartolome, 117
Catholic Church, 106
cattle, 58
cavalry, 67
Chiang Kai-shek, 147
child mortality rates, 129
China: anti-trade policy of, 97; Britain’s
Opium War with, 146–47; economic
development in, 180; GDP of, 154;
global output of, 181; Great Leap
Forward of, 147–48; Guangzhou, 190,
190; gunpowder developed in, 104; Han
Dynasty and boundaries of, 80; Japan
invading, 147; language in, 72; as Middle
Kingdom, 96; navigational capacity
of, 95–96; open world trade embraced
by, 98; per capita GDP of, 180; Qin
in, 80; R&D spending of, 182, 182;
Shandong, 191; Smith describing, 98;
Song Dynasty of, 88–91; transnational
cooperation of, 205; U.S. and rising
power of, 193
Christianity, 67, 70
Churchill, Winston, 159
cinchona tree, 152
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251
CIS. See Commonwealth of Independent
States
civilizational advances, 66–67
civilizations, alluvial, 46–48
Civil War, U.S. (1861–65), 161
Classical Age, 2–3, 7, 195; empires of, 69;
lessons from, 94; population in, 11;
religions of, 69
Cleopatra, 77
climate, of Russia, 112–13
climate change, 13, 17, 188; carbon storage
in, 199; fossil fuels and, 170; human
activity in, 197
climate zones: CIS, EU and Asia in, 113;
dry regions in, 24; Eurasian populations
by, 24–25, 25; Köppen-Geiger
Mediterranean, 79; lucky latitudes in, 49;
population distribution across, 83–84, 84;
of steppes, 53; tropical regions in, 22–23
CO2. See carbon dioxide
coal, 16, 18, 51, 131; Britain’s access to, 137,
143; geological deposits of, 145; in
industrialization, 27–28, 145
coastal regions, 25–27
Code of Hammurabi, 66
coffee, 119–20
cold zones, 24
colonial era, 163–64
Columbian exchange, 100–103, 101
Columbus, Christopher, 11, 99, 99, 108
Commentariolus (Copernicus), 105
Commonwealth of Independent States
(CIS), 27, 112, 113
communications, 15
competitive exclusion, 37
computers, 4–5, 170–71, 175
Conference of Berlin (1885), 152
conflict risks, 192–93
Confucianism, 69, 71–72, 90
consensus, lack of, 211
consonantal writing system, 73
Constantine XI (Byzantine emperor), 98
Constantinople, fall of, 104–5
consumerism, in Europe, 119
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 105, 135
Copper age, 3, 61
Corded Ware culture, 63
cotton, 120–21
countries: illiteracy of, 164, 164–65; life
expectancy of, 164, 164–65; per capita
GDP of, 142; population and global
output of, 209, 209–10
crops, 50, 101, 101
Crosby, Alfred, 100
Cuban Missile Crisis, 213
cultural acceleration, 37–38
Cultural Revolution, 148
cuneiform, 47–48, 66
Cw temperate monsoon climate, 23
Cyrus the Great, 73
da Gama, Vasco, 11, 98–99, 100
data, 4, 169, 172, 219–20, 226n7
da Vinci, Leonardo, 135
Declaration of Independence, 131
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(Gibbon), 131
decolonization, 163–67
Deep Blue (IBM computer), 175
demographic changes, 2
Deng Xiaoping, 180
Denisovans, 3, 35–37
Department of Defense, U.S., 171
developing countries, 178, 179
Diamond, Jared, 46
Dias, Bartolomou, 98
Digital Age, 2, 4–5, 196; economic growth
in, 193–94; global interactions in, 11
digital revolution, 166, 168, 170–77, 186
digital technologies, 181
Diocletian (Roman emperor), 77–80
directed technical change, 199
diseases: of Africa, 152; from Europe,
102; of livestock, 101–2; smallpox,
102; tropical vector-borne, 49, 117;
trypanosomiasis, 50
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divergence, great global, 143–46, 144
dog domestication, 54–55
domestication, animal, 18–19, 46, 54–59
donkeys, 47, 55, 57–59, 67
Drake, Francis, 109, 116
dromedary camels, 55
droughts, 190, 191
dryland empires, 51
dry regions, 22, 24
Dutch East India Company, 108–9, 120
Dylan, Bob, 30
Earth, 103, 138
East Asia, 165
East India Company, 108–10, 116, 120, 148
East Indies, 108
ecological crisis, 170
ecological zones, 45–46
Economic Consequences of the Peace, The
(Keynes), 155–56, 158
economic development: Britain and U.S.,
154, 154; in China, 180; extreme poverty
ended by, 198–99; primary energy
reserves in, 27–28; riverine cities in,
47–48; from technologies, 21
economic growth, 10, 138; in Digital Age,
193–94; living standard through, 196–97;
sustainable, 187
economics, 10, 159, 184
egalitarianism, 39–40
Egypt, 47, 60, 73; Britain controlling, 154;
earliest kingdoms of, 66
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 199
Eldorado city, 117
electricity, 141
Elizabeth (queen of England), 110, 116
Emancipation Decree of 1861, 121
Empire of Cotton (Beckert), 120
empires: Achaemenid, 74–75, 77; Africa
divided by European, 153; Akkadian,
66; of Alexander the Great, 76; British,
112, 154–55; Byzantine, 85–88, 86; of
Classical Age, 69; climate zones
distribution of, 83–84, 84; dryland, 51;
of Eurasia, 82, 82–83; globalization with
competing, 28; greed in building, 114–15;
Habsburg, 157; Han, 80–83; Hellenistic,
76; land-based, 3–4, 73–76; lucky
latitudes and land, 73–74; Maratha,
148; Mongol, 65, 86, 91–93, 92; Mughal,
111, 148; multiethnic multireligious, 11;
Neo-Assyrian, 66, 73–74, 74; Ottoman,
89, 111, 158; Parthian, 82–83; Portugal
and, 110, 110–11; Roman, 77–80, 82–83,
85–88, 156; Romanov, 158; Russian,
27, 112–14; Safavid, 111; Seleucid, 77;
temperate zone, 51; Timurid, 93, 93–94;
transoceanic, 4; Umayyad, 87, 87. See also
global empires
empirical research, 75
employment, 16, 226n7
encephalization, 33
encomiendas (land grants), 117
End of Poverty, The (book), 176
energy, 18, 133–35, 134
environmental, social, and governance
(ESG), 200
environmental crisis, 184, 187–90
environmental process, 11–12, 19
Equestrian Age, 2–3, 7, 11, 67–68, 195
equestrian states, 65–66
equine piroplasmosis (theileria parva), 55
equus ferus. See wild horses
Erasmus, Desiderius, 105
ESG. See environmental, social, and
governance
EU. See European Union
eudaimonia (flourishing life), 212
Eurasia: advantages of, 20–22; alluvial
civilizations of, 46–48; empires of, 82,
82–83; horse-based societies in, 62–63,
65; horses role in, 53; Mongol control
of, 92; North American compared
to, 63; population by climate zone of,
24–25, 25; population of, 44; steppes
in, 24, 54; technological advances in,
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49; temperate zones of, 48; world
production share of, 21, 21; writing
systems in, 70; Yamnaya breakthrough
in, 62–65
Europe: Africa divided by empires of, 153;
African onslaught by, 151–52; age of
inquiry in, 104–6; Asia’s divergence
with, 144–45; consumerism in,
119; cotton for factories of, 120–21;
decolonization and, 163–67; diseases
from, 102; farmers in, 45; global empire
sought by, 108–12; global-scale trade
of, 107–8; Indian Ocean dominated by,
103–4; industrialization diffusion in,
141–43; languages from, 50, 64–65; lucky
latitudes in, 48–49; New World divided
up by, 111; North America sea routes
linking, 125–26; North America settled
by, 22; population of, 27; precious metals
of, 117; print shops in, 105; wars of,
156–59; Western, 99, 126, 143
European Union (EU), 113, 182, 182
eusociality, 34
evolutionary process, 33
extreme poverty, 129, 165; basic human
needs and, 225n4; economic objectives
ending, 198–99; end of, 176, 183, 213;
rates of, 9, 177; technologies reducing,
177
“Fable of the Bees, The” (Mandeville), 115
Faraday, 141
farm animals, 55
farmers, 41, 129; in Europe, 45; nomadism
compared to, 43–45; Russia’s peasant,
113–14; systems for, 82; U.S. food from,
15; villages of, 5, 43–45
farm mechanization, 5
Ferdinand (king), 99, 108
Fertile Crescent, 42, 66–67
fertility rates, 13, 135, 201
feudal structure, 151
fiber-optics cables, 172
fire, control of, 18
flood control, 47
flourishing life (eudaimonia), 212
Food and Agricultural Organization, 161
food production, 4, 135
foragers, 35–36, 39–40
fossil fuels, 4, 27, 133; Asia polluted by, 190;
climate change and, 170; CO2 emitted
from, 184; to renewable energy, 13,
187–88
France, 122–23
Francis (pope), 211
free markets, 204
French East India Company, 110
French Revolution, 5, 123
Galileo, 106, 135–36
GATT. See General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade
GDP. See gross domestic product
GEI. See Global Energy Interconnection
initiative
GEIDCO. See Global Energy
Interconnection Development and
Cooperation Organization
gender equality, 199, 201
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT), 161
general-purpose technology (GPT), 134
Genghis Khan, 91, 93
geography, 12, 18, 106; factors involved in,
17–18; of Japan, 150; North America
bounties from, 21–22; physical, 19; of
Russia, 113–14; technologies and, 18
geological deposits, of coal, 145
geopolitics, 30; leadership, 162, 168; power
in, 184–85
Germany, 156, 158
Gibbon, Edward, 131
gin and tonic, 152
global capitalism, 107–8, 120–21
global convergence, 163–67
global divergence, 143–46, 144
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global economic activity, 170
global empires, 111; of Britain, 109; Europe
seeking, 108–12; nations of, 124; Smith’s
summation of, 124–26; of Spain and
Portugal, 110, 110–11; war among, 121–24
Global Energy Interconnection
Development and Cooperation
Organization (GEIDCO), 205
Global Energy Interconnection (GEI)
initiative, 205
global hegemony, of U.S., 159–62, 168
globalization: ages of, 6; Anglo-American
dominance in, 130; consensus lacking
in, 211; distinct ages of, 1–5; empires
competing in, 28; employment shares
by sectors in, 16; in Industrial Age, 129;
of politics, 69; shared reality in, 214
global output, 179, 181, 209, 209–10
global patterns, 145–46
global trade, 4, 84, 98, 107–8, 137
global warming, 197
Glorious Revolution (1688), 122, 136
Goering, Hermann, 212–13
Golden Hind (vessel), 116
Golden Rule, 212
Goodrich, L. Carrington, 80
goods, production of, 14
Goth group, 65, 86
GPT. See general-purpose technology
grains, 45
grasslands, 53
Great Depression, 157, 159, 167
Great Dispersal from Africa, 34–35, 35
Great Leap Forward, 147–48
Greco-Roman world, 70
Greece, 77–78
greed, in building empires, 114–15
Greek alphabet, 48, 71
Greek society, 76–79
greenhouse gases, 184, 187, 189
gross domestic product (GDP), 139, 154,
188. See also per capita GDP
Guangzhou, China, 190, 190
gunpowder, 29, 103–4
Guns, Germs, and Steel (Diamond), 46
Guttenberg, Johannes, 105, 131
Habsburg Empire, 157–58
Han Dynasty, 80, 81, 93
Han Empire, 80–83
health care, 199–200
Hellenistic empire, 76
Henry (king of Portugal), 98
Henry the Navigator, 108
Herodotus, 28, 75
hierarchical structure, of societies, 39
hieroglyphics, 47–48, 50, 66
highland regions, 22
Hinduism, 70
Histories (Herodotus), 75
Hitler, Adolph, 158–59
Holland, 109, 137, 141
Holocene period, 58
hominin brains, 33, 35
Homo sapiens, 3, 33–34, 36–37, 195
horse-drawn chariot, 29, 67
Horse in Human History, The (Kelekna), 62
horses: agriculture using, 65–66;
domestication of, 18–19, 46, 57–59;
Eurasia and societies using, 62–63, 65;
Eurasian role of, 53; hunted for meat,
58; long-distance trade from, 67; in
North America, 101; North American
extinction of, 56; societies based on,
59; steppes with domestication of,
59; technologies distributed by, 64; as
transportation vehicle, 54; warhorse
and, 60; wild, 36, 55, 57, 62
House of Wisdom (Bayt-al-Hikmah), 78
Huawei, 181
human activities, 11–12, 197
human destiny, 214
human dignity, 212
human history, 1–2, 5
human needs, 225n4
human settlements, 10–11
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human society, 38–40
human thought, 105
Hun group, 65
hunter-gatherers, 40, 195; farm villages
forcing out, 43–45; in Paleolithic Age,
15–16; wild horses killed off by, 55;
Yamnaya people as, 63
hybridization of ideas, 138
Hyde 3.1 Project, 7, 83
hydraulic civilizations, 47
hydroelectric power, 143
Hyksos group, 65
IBM computers, 175
Ibn Rushd, 78
Ibn Sina, 78
ice age, 42
ICTs. See information and
communications technologies
Ieyasu, Tokugawa, 150
illiteracy, of countries, 164, 164–65
impartial spectator, 124
imperialism, 107
India, 148–49
Indian Ocean, 97, 102–4
indigenous people, 102, 116–20
Indo-European language, 50, 64–65
Industrial Age, 2, 4, 7, 11, 195; Britain
entering, 133; globalization in, 129;
lessons from, 167–68; steam engine in,
16–17, 131–34, 132
industrialization, 5, 7–9; of Britain, 135–38,
142–43, 155; coal in, 27–28, 145; colonial
era ending and, 163–64; economic
divergence in, 144, 144; Europe’s
diffusion of, 141–43; global patterns of,
145–46; of Japan, 150; self-sustaining,
137–38; stages of, 141
industrial production, 14
Industrial Revolution, 17, 138
inequalities, 196–97; challenges from,
185–86; economic, 184; gender, 199;
technological changes for, 30
Influence of Sea Power Upon History,
1660–1783, The (Mahan), 112
information, 169
information and communications
technologies (ICTs), 141
information technologies, 4–5
infrastructure development, 161
innovative designs, 138–41
In Praise of Folly (Erasmus), 105
input layer, 174
inquiry, age of, 104–6
institutions, 1, 17, 18, 19–20
integrated circuits, 171–72
intelligent technologies, 141
internal combustion engines, 4
International Monetary Fund, 161, 178
investments, 183
invisible hand, 114
iron, 61–62
irrigation, 47
Isabella (queen), 99, 108
Islam, 78, 85–88
Iwakura Mission, 151
James II (king of Britain), 122
Japan: China invaded by, 147; feudal
structure of, 151; geography of, 150;
industrialization of, 150; as military
powerhouse, 146; population of, 150;
Russo-Japanese War and, 151; Sino-
Japan War and, 151
Jaspers, Karl, 70–71
Jeopardy (game show), 175
Jesuit Order of the Catholic Church, 106
Jin Dynasty, 90
job losses, 185
Judaism, 67
Jurchen horsemen, 90
Kant, Immanuel, 207, 212
Kasparov, Garry, 175–76
Kelekna, Pita, 62, 81
Kennedy, John F., 30–31, 200, 211, 213–14
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Kenya-Somalia border, 190, 191
Keynes, John Maynard, 155–56, 158
Kievan Rus, 92
Kilby, Jack, 171
kingdoms, of Egypt, 66
King William’s War, 122
knowledge, advancements in, 105–6
Koch, Alexander, 102
Kondratiev, Nikolai, 139
Kondratiev waves, 139–41, 140
Köppen-Geiger climate system, 22–23, 23,
218
Köppen-Geiger Mediterranean climate
zone, 79
Kuhn, Dieter, 90
Kurki, Sofi, 139, 141
land areas, 228n10
land-based empires, 3–4, 73–76
land grants (encomiendas), 117
land power (tellurocracy), 72
land use, 103, 188, 222–23
language, 38, 167; book writings with, 71;
in China, 72; from Europe, 50, 64–65;
Indo-European, 50, 64–65. See also
writing systems
leadership, geopolitical, 162, 168
League of Nations, 207
legal codes, 66
legal practices, 19
Lehman Brothers, 5
Leyes Nuevos (New Laws), 117
life, on Earth, 138
life expectancy, of countries, 164, 164–65
life satisfaction, 202
Little Ice Age, 103
livestock, 101, 101–2
living standards, 13, 196–97
llamas, 56, 61
local governance, 204
Louis XIV (king of France), 106, 122
Loyola, Ignatius de, 106
Luce, Henry, 159
lucky latitudes: ancient urban centers in,
67; in climate zones, 49; in Europe,
48–49; global trade within, 84; land
empires in, 73–74; Old World, 228n10;
technological innovations in, 50–51; in
U.S., 49; world population in, 83
Luther, Martin, 105
Machiavelli, Nicola, 105, 212
machine intelligence, 173, 175
machines, 14–15
Maddison, Angus, 7–8, 20, 141, 143
Magyar group, 65, 86
Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 112
maize, 42, 45
malaria, 19–23, 49–50, 102, 152
Malthus, Thomas Robert, 12–13
Malthusian curse, 12–13
Mandeville, Bernard, 115
al-Mansur, Abdullah ibn Muhammad, 78
Mao Zedong, 147–48
Maratha Empire, 148
Marco Polo, 98
maritime trade, 72
mathematical weighting, 174–75
megafauna, 35–36, 55
Mehmed II (Ottoman sultan), 98
Meiji Restoration, 151, 180
Mencius, state law of, 71
Mesopotamia, 66
metal ages, 61–62
metallurgy, 50, 134
microprocessor, 172
microwave transmission, 172
Middle Kingdom, 96
Middle Paleolithic, 34
migration: from Africa, 34–35, 41; from
Anatolia, 64; from Asia, 227n11; during
Neolithic Age, 64; in Paleolithic Age,
10–11; from steppes, 64
military: confrontation, 109; Japan’s
powerhouse, 146; technology, 29–30;
U.S. bases for, 162, 163
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Ming Dynasty, 93, 96–97
mobile phones, 173, 173
modernity, 38
Moller, Violet, 78
Mongol Empire, 65, 86, 91–93, 92
Mongol Yuan, 81
monsoon patterns, 47
Moore, Gordon, 172
Moore’s law, 172, 172, 175
More, Thomas, 105
Morris, Ian, 48
mosquito (anopheles gambiae), 152
mountain zones, 24
movable type, 105
Mughal Empire, 111, 148
multiethnic multireligious
empires, 11
multi-national groups, 205
Nanjing Treaty (1842), 147
Napoleonic Wars, 123, 129
native Americans, 102–3, 119
natural gas, 145
natural resources, 160
naval power, of Britain, 112
naval technology, 96
navigational capacity, of China, 95–96
Nazis, 171, 212
Neanderthals, 3, 35–37, 40
Neo-Assyrian Empire, 66, 73–74, 74
Neolithic Age, 2–3, 7, 10–11, 195; agriculture
in, 5, 8; lessons from, 51–52; migrations
during, 64
networks, computer, 171
neural networks, 174, 174–75
Newcomen, Thomas, 131–33
New International Economic Order
(NIEO), 167, 208
New Laws (Leyes Nuevos), 117
New Stone Age, 61
Newton, Isaac, 106, 131, 136
New World: African slaves in, 116–20;
crops exchanged with, 101; European
powers dividing, 111; species exchanged
with, 100–101
Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 77
NIEO. See New International Economic
Order
Nine Years’ War (1688–97), 122
nomadic populations, 43–45, 60
North America: Eurasia compared to,
63; European colonists settling, 22;
European sea routes linking, 125–26;
geographical bounties of, 21–22; horse
extinction in, 56; horses in, 101; King
William’s War in, 122; land use in, 103;
population of, 102, 103; slave plantations
of, 119; technologies cut off from, 51–52
North Atlantic, 98–101
Novum Organum (Bacon, F.), 106
Noyce, Robert, 171
nuclear powers, 30
ocean acidification, 188
Ocean Age, 2, 4, 7, 195; global reach in, 11;
lessons from, 126–27
ocean navigation, 97–101
ocean shipping, 134
Ogedei Khan, 91
oil reserves, 18
Old World, 100–101, 228n10
Old World technologies, 21
Opium War, 146–47
organic economy, 133
Ottoman Empire, 89, 111, 158
Our Common Future (report), 197
overland transport, 25
oxen, 47
ozone depletion, 188
pack animals, 56
packet switching, 171
Paleolithic Age, 2–3, 7, 195; dog
domestication in, 54–55; human
dispersal during, 35; hunter/gatherers
in, 15–16; lessons from, 40; Middle
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258
Paleolithic of, 34; migration and human
settlement in, 10–11; productive activity
in, 15; sub-periods of, 226n1
papermaking, 82
Paris Climate Agreement, 232n4
Parthasarathi, Prasannan, 149
Parthian Empire, 82–83
Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963), 213
Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), 182
patents, 182
pathogens, 101, 101–2
Paul III (pope), 106
Pax Mongolica, 92
PCT. See Patent Cooperation Treaty
Pearl Harbor, 159
Pederson, Neil, 91
Peloponnesian Wars, 75
Peloponnesian Wars (Thucydides), 75
People’s Republic of China, 147
per capita GDP: in Britain and Holland,
141; of China, 180; of countries, 142; of
developing countries, 178, 179
permanent settlements, 41
Persia, 74, 76, 83
Persian-Greek Wars, 75
petroleum, 145
Philip of Macedon, 75
philosophers, Islamic, 78
philosophy, 70
Phoenicians, 72–73
physical geography, 1, 19
plague (yersinia pestis), 45
planetary boundaries, 187–92, 189, 197
plantations, 117
Plato, 69–70, 73, 75
Pleistocene age, 57
polar regions, 22
politics, 4, 69
Pope, Alexander, 136
population: agriculture and, 135; CIS, EU
and Asia density of, 113; in Classical
Age, 11; climate zones distribution of,
83–84, 84; of countries, 209, 209–10; data
on, 219–20; of Eurasia, 44; Eurasian
climate zones, 24–25, 25; of Europe, 27;
of Han Empire, 82–83; of Japan, 150;
land use and, 222–23; lucky latitudes
and world, 83; nomadic, 43–45, 60; of
North America, 102, 103; river areas
density of, 26; of Roman Empire, 82–83;
urbanization and, 130; world, 8, 10, 83, 135
Portugal, 97–98; Cape Verde islands
colonized by, 108; discovered lands
divided with, 109; global empires of,
110, 110–11
potatoes, 42
PPP. See purchasing-power-parity
precious metals, 117
primary energy reserves, 27–28
primary sectors, 14–16
Prince, The (Machiavelli), 105
Princep, Gavrilo, 157
printing, 105, 131
print shops, in Europe, 105
private goods, 203–4
private law, 19
privately owned corporations, 107
production: Eurasia’s share of, 21, 21;
food, 4, 135; of goods, 14; industrial, 14;
Paleolithic Age activity in, 15; sectors of,
14–16; systems, 107; world, 21, 21
profits, capitalism seeking, 115–16
Ptolemaic Kingdom, 77
public goods, 203–5
public law, 19
purchasing-power-adjusted prices, 180
purchasing-power-parity (PPP), 180, 225n4
Qin Dynasty, 80
Qing Dynasty, 111, 146–47
Qin Shi Huang, 80
quinine, 152
railroads, 19, 134–35, 139, 160
R&D spending, 182, 182, 199
Paleolithic Age (continued )
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259
recombinant growth, 139
Reformation, 105
regime change operations, 162
regional groupings, 205
religions, 69–70, 211–12, 214
renewable energy, 13, 187–88
Republic (Plato), 73
Rio Earth Summit, 197
river areas, 25–27
river barges, 134
riverine cities, 26, 47–48
robots, 185–86
Roman emperor (Diocletian), 77–80
Roman Empire: Diocletian dividing,
77–80; fall of, 85–88; German tribes
defeating, 156; population of, 82–83
Romanov Empire, 158
Romer, Paul, 139
Roosevelt, Franklin, 159
Royal Navy, 153
Royal Society of Edinburgh, 136
ruminants, 55
Russian Empire, 27, 112–14
Russo-Japanese War (1904-5), 151
sabertoothed cats, 55
Safavid Empire, 111
sailboats, 47
Saint-Domingue slave rebellion, 121
Satsuma Rebellion, 151
Savery, Thomas, 131
scholarship, 105
Science (Bush), 160
Scythians group, 65
SDG. See Sustainable Development Goals
sea level rise, 192, 192
sea power (thalassocracy), 72–73
secondary sectors, 14–16
Second Opium War, 147
Security Council, 209, 210
sedentism, 41, 43–45
Sedol, Lee, 176
Seleucid Empire, 77
self-driving trucks, 186
Seljuk group, 65
semiconductors, 171
Seven Years’ War, 122, 148
Shandong, China, 191
Shang Dynasty, 48
Shannon, Claude, 171
shared reality, 214
ships, cannon-laden, 104
Silk Road, 24, 84, 85, 98
Sino-Japan War, 151
skilled workers, 186
slavery: from Africa, 118, 118–19; indigenous
people and, 116–20; North America
plantations with, 119; Saint-Domingue
rebellion of, 121; for sugar plantations,
120; in temperate zone, 119
smallpox, 102
smart machines, 202
Smith, Adam, 98; global empires
summation by, 124–26; invisible hand
from, 114; Wealth of Nations by, 26, 124,
131, 196
Social Conquest of Earth, The (Wilson, E.),
170
social democracy, 202
social-democratic ethos, 201–3
social institutions, 19–20
societies: Eurasia with horse-based, 62–63,
65; Greek, 76–79; hierarchical structure
of, 39; horse-based, 59; human, 38–40
soil nutrients, 19
Song Dynasty, 88–91, 89, 104
Soviet Union, 30, 161–62, 207
Spain, 97, 108–11, 110
state law, 71
steam engine, 4; global trading of, 137; in
Industrial Age, 16–17, 131–34, 132; Watt
patenting, 17
steel, 139
steppes: of Asia, 53; climate zones of, 53;
Eurasian, 24, 54; horse domestication
in, 59; migration from, 64
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Index
260
subsidiarity doctrine, 196, 203–4
sugar, 119–20
sugar plantations, 120
Summa Theologica (Aquinas), 78
Sun Yat-Sen, 147
sustainable agriculture, 13
sustainable development, 31, 183–85,
196–200; economic growth from, 187;
governance of, 200; public goods for,
204–5; religious leaders on, 211–12; U.N.
goals of, 198, 201–2
Sustainable Development Goals (SDG),
178, 198, 202
syphilis, 102
tabula rasa (blank-slate learning), 176
Taiping Rebellion, 147
tea infusion, 152
technologies, 1–2, 11, 18, 70; digital, 181;
digital revolution and, 166; economic
development from, 21; environmental
impact of, 188–90; Eurasian advances
in, 49; of farm villages, 45; geography
and, 18; of Han Empire, 82; horses
distributing, 64; inequalities and
changes in, 30; information, 4–5;
innovative designs for, 138–41;
institutions and, 17; intelligent, 141;
lucky latitudes innovations in, 50–51;
military, 29–30; naval, 96; North
America cut off from, 51–52; Old
World, 21; for poverty reduction, 177;
upheavals from, 130; U.S. advances in,
160; wireless, 181
tellurocracy (land power), 72
temperate zones: advantages to, 22–25;
empires, 51; of Eurasia, 48; slavery in,
119
territorial competition, 28
tertiary sectors, 14–16
textile industry, 134; of Britain, 121; of India,
149; robots in, 186
thalassocracy (sea power), 72–73
theileria parva (equine piroplasmosis), 55
Thirty Years’ War, 156–57
Thucydides, 75
Timurid Empire, 83, 93, 93–94
tin mines, 61
tobacco, 119–20
Tokugawa Shogunate, 150
trade, 67
Trajan (emperor), 79
transistors, 171, 172
transnational cooperation, 205
transoceanic empires, 4
transportation vehicle, 54
transport systems, 203
Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), 109–10
Treaty of Versailles, 157
Treaty of Zaragoza (1529), 109–10
triangular trade, 119
tropical vector-borne diseases, 49, 117
tropical zones, 22–23
trucks, self-driving, 186
trypanosomiasis disease, 50
tsetse flies, 56, 152
Turing, Alan, 170, 173
Turing machine, 170
Turkish tribes, 88
Turse, Nick, 162
U.K. See United Kingdom
Umayyad Empire, 87, 87
U.N. See United Nations
UN Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC), 204
United Kingdom (U.K.), 144
United Nations (U.N.), 167; as anti-fascist
alliance, 207; global center of gravity
and, 209–10; reformation of, 207–10;
Security Council, 210; sustainable
development goals of, 198, 201–2; U.S.
supporting, 208–10
United States (U.S.): birth of, 130–31;
Britain’s economic dominance with,
154; China’s rising power and, 193;
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Index
261
Civil War of, 161; Declaration of
Independence of, 131; decolonization
supported by, 166–67; Department of
Defense, 171; dominant economy of,
159; economic development of, 154,
154; farmer’s food in, 15; GDP of, 154;
geopolitical leadership of, 162; global
hegemony of, 159–62, 168; global output
of, 181; infrastructure development
of, 161; lucky latitudes in, 49; military
bases of, 162, 163; primary sector
employment in, 16; R&D spending
of, 182, 182; regime change operations
of, 162; Soviet Union challenges to,
161–62; technology advances of, 160;
UK comparisons with, 144; unlimited
resources of, 121; U.N. supported by,
208–10; War of Independence of, 123;
world output of, 155
Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
207
universal health care, 199–200
Upper Pleistocene, 37–40
Urban II (pope), 88
urbanization, 7; population and, 130; rates
of, 8, 9; transformation to, 14–16
U.S. See United States
Utopia (More), 105
venture capital (VC), 182, 183
Victoria (queen of England), 153
Vietnam, 81
Vine, David, 162
von Neumann, John, 171
warhorse, 60
War of Independence, U.S., 123
wars: Britain and France in, 123; conflict risks
of, 192–93; of Europe, 156–59; geopolitical
powers and, 184–85; global empires and,
121–24; King William in, 122; Napoleonic,
123, 129; Nine Years’, 122; Opium, 146–47;
Peloponnesian, 75; Persian-Greek, 75;
Russo-Japanese, 151; Second Opium, 147;
Seven Years’, 122, 148; Sino-Japan, 151;
Thirty Years’, 156–57; U.S. Civil War, 161;
World War I, 155, 157–58; World War II,
147, 155, 159, 163–65, 171
waterways, 26
waterwheels, 133
Watson (IBM computer), 175
Watt, James, 17, 131, 136–37
Wealth of Nations (Smith), 26, 124, 131, 196
weapon systems, 29–30
Webster, Max, 20
Weitzman, Martin, 138
WEOG. See Western Europe and Others
Group
Western Europe, 99, 126, 143
Western Europe and Others Group
(WEOG), 209
Westminster Act (1931), 154
wheat, 46
wild horses (equus ferus), 36, 55, 57, 58, 62
Wilenius, Markku, 139, 141
William of Orange (monarch of Holland),
122, 136
Wilson, E. O., 34, 39, 170, 214
Wilson, Woodrow, 158, 207
windmills, 133
wireless technology, 181
Wittfogel, Karl S., 227n7
woolly mammoth, 36, 55
World Bank, 161, 225n4
World Health Organization, 161
world output, 9, 155, 166
world population, 8, 10, 83, 135
world production, 21, 21
World War I, 155, 157–58
World War II, 147, 155, 159, 163–65, 171
Wrigley, E. A., 133
writing systems: consonantal, 73; in
Eurasia, 70; Greek alphabet in, 48, 71;
hieroglyphics, 47–48, 50, 66; language
and books with, 71; by Phoenicians,
72–73
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Index
262
Xiognu Khanate, 80, 86
Yamnaya people, 45, 62–65
yellow fever, 102
yersinia pestis (the plague), 45
Yongle emperor, 97
Younger Dryas, 36, 41
zebras, 58
zero-carbon energy, 28, 199
Zheng He, 95, 96, 97
zones. See climate zones; cold zones;
ecological zones; mountain zones;
temperate zones
Zoroastrianism, 71
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- The Ages of Globalization cover - 2020-07-22 (2) 560x842
- Front Matter
- Contents
- Preface
- Ch 1
- Ch 2
- Ch 3
- Ch 4
- Ch 5
- Ch 6
- Ch 7
- Ch 8
- Ch 9
- Acknowledgments
- Data Appendix
- Notes
- Further Readings
- Bibliography
- Index
