This chapter explains that globalisation is not new but the result of centuries of connections between societies through trade, migration, capital and the movement of people and ideas. Ancient routes such as the Silk Routes linked Asia, Europe and Africa, carrying goods, faiths and even diseases. The Columbian exchange after 1500 transferred crops like potatoes and maize to the Old World while germs such as smallpox devastated the Americas. In the nineteenth century three flows shaped the global economy — the flow of trade in goods, the flow of labour as migrants and indentured workers, and the flow of capital as investment. Technologies like railways, steamships and the refrigerated ship reorganised food production and trade across continents. The chapter then examines the disruptions of the twentieth century: the First World War, the Great Depression of the 1930s with its collapse of prices and employment, and the rebuilding after the Second World War through the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and the World Bank). It closes with the post-war decades of growth and the later shift of production to low-wage countries.
Pre-modern trade and the Silk RoutesThe nineteenth-century world economyIndentured labour and global migrationThe inter-war crisis and the Great DepressionRebuilding the post-war economy: Bretton Woods
Key terms
Globalisation
The growing integration of economies and societies through trade, capital and the movement of people.
Silk Routes
Ancient trade routes linking Asia with Europe and North Africa.
Indentured labour
Bonded workers contracted to work for an employer for a fixed period to repay passage.
Columbian exchange
The transfer of crops, people and diseases between the Old and New Worlds after 1492.
Great Depression
The worldwide slump of 1929–30s marked by falling prices, output and jobs.
Bretton Woods
The 1944 agreement that set up the IMF and the World Bank.
Tariff
A tax imposed on imported goods at the border.
Corn Laws
British laws restricting grain imports, later abolished to allow cheaper food.
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