Abstract
This chapter examines several consecutive periods of the earliest history of globalization. In the ninth to seventh millennia bce, an Afro-Eurasian network emerged. Although it formed slowly and was a loose entity, it nevertheless functioned as a means of spreading innovation. Indeed, it transmitted information and ideas from one society to another, thus enabling the diffusion of technologies and innovations such as domesticated plants, animals, and metallurgy. This chapter traces the origins and diffusion patterns of some of these innovations (such as some crops from the Near Eastern “founder crop package,” some animal domesticates, as well as copper, bronze, and iron metallurgy, war chariots, and some luxury goods). The most important stages in the evolution of ancient globalization were related to the “Urban Revolution” (fourth to mid-third millennia bce), and subsequently to the emergence of agrarian empires (1200 bce–150 ce), which increased the density and variability of interconnections between the societies of the Afro-Eurasian world-system.
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Notes
- 1.
For comparison, “only the largest communities of the early agrarian era contained more than 500 people, and most had fewer than 50” (Christian 2004: 286).
- 2.
Interestingly, it was invented as a secret writing system, allowing the merchants to cipher the information about their deals. However, its main principle—one written symbol corresponding to one sound—turned out to be so practical that several writing systems developed on this basis. Today, almost all alphabetic writing systems of the world (except the Korean system, for example) descend from the Phoenician writing system (Coulmas 1989; Daniels and Bright 1996).
- 3.
Book printing was invented twice: first in China and, after several centuries, in medieval Europe—though one cannot exclude a possible Chinese connection to the European discovery.
- 4.
(Triticum dicoccum Schübl., Triticum monococcum L., Hordeum vulgare L., Pisum sativum L., Lens culinaris Medik., Cicer arietinum L., Vicia ervilia (L.) Willd., Linum usitatissimum L.).
- 5.
Domestication of African rice is localized in Sahel, Upper Niger (Li et al. 2011).
- 6.
Around 2000 bce a number of other Chinese cultivars, such as peaches, apricots, and millet, reached the northwestern regions of India and Pakistan (Fuller 2011).
- 7.
This was several times greater than the usual distance traveled by gatherers in their daily search for resources.
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Zinkina, J. et al. (2019). Archaic Globalization: The Birth of the World-System. In: A Big History of Globalization. World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05707-7_3
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