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First Module videos of 21

MODULE 1: Waves of Globalization in HistoryComponents:

o Video Chapters (5) – Total Time: approximately 88 minutesAbout this module: In the first week of the course, Professor Jeffrey Sachs argues that humanity has always been globalized. He presents six waves of globalization and discusses the main drivers of global-scale change, as well as the main channels of diffusion of change. Prof. Sachs introduces the concepts of innovation and diffusion, and discusses the concepts of catch-up and leapfrogging, which apply to countries which have historically not participated in a given technological innovation. We learn about the constant relevance of Eurasia in the spread of ideas and technologies, and, in relation to this, Prof. Sachs introduces the concept of the so-called “lucky-latitudes.”

MODULE 1: Waves of Globalization in History – 6 MAJOR ONES 28 minChapter 1.1: Six Major Globalizations

Thought-provoking questions:o When did globalization actually start? Is there a specific point in time, or were

there different waves of globalization?o In the context of this course, what does globalization mean?

Components: o Video Chapters (5) – Total Time: approximately 88 minutes

Welcome to this mini course on globalization, past and future.We’re going to take a very quick romp through the history of globalization, starting inthe deep past, at the beginning of our species and ending with reflections and thoughts andguesses about globalization in the 21st Century.My theme is that we have always been globalized as humanity.During many epochs, global scale change, changes in technology, changes in governance, changesin politics have affected the whole world.And understanding the dynamics of global scale change is therefore, fascinating, becauseit tells the story of humanity, and also useful because it gives us some grounding, some sighting,some idea about how change may occur in our time and indeed how we should work to guidethe kind of change that we’re going to need in the 21st Century.I might have called this mini course, globalizations, because we have in fact had distinct erasor distinct epochs, or you could call them waves of globalization.And in this first module, I want to introduce those six major waves of globalization thatI’m going to be discussing in this mini course and then start to take a look at thefundamental principles of how global change occurs, what are the main drivers of globalchange, what are the channels or pathways by which change in one part of the world diffusesto the rest of the world.And in general, what kinds of lessons might we take from history to give us some helpin understanding the tumultuous changes that are underway in our world today.So let’s start in this first chapter about the waves of globalization.And while one could allot history into different bins or different datings, I’m going topropose six globalizations for us to study.The first of these is the beginning of humanity, what might be called the great dispersal ofhomo sapiens, our species, out of Africa and spreading throughout the whole world.


The second globalization is the Neolithic Revolution.We began as hunters and gatherers, but around 10,000 years ago, an increasing proportionof humanity became sedentary farmers.And that was the so-called Neolithic Revolution, from hunting and gathering to agriculture,from a nomadic life to a settled life in villages, and then eventually in towns, and eventuallyin cities.The third globalization are the great land based empires of roughly two millennia ago.The Han Empire in China, the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean region.And the trade in between.And of course other large land-based empires of that age.The fourth globalization that I’m going to want to discuss is in a way, kind of beginningof the modern world that we know today, it’s the globalization that took place with thediscoveries of Christopher Columbus on the sea route from Europe to the Americas andVasco da Gama on the sea route between Europe and Asia, which connected all parts of theworld through ocean navigation.And that led to profound changes in geopolitics, in the world economy, in ideas and in manyways was one of the most tumultuous eras and events of human history.The fifth globalization that I want to discuss is the Industrial Age.But I’m going to note that it’s also the Anglo-American age.It’s the period when first, the United Kingdom and then after World War II, the United States,were the dominant powers of the world and really shaped the world institutionally, inlanguage, in the use of English as the common language for business and science throughoutthe world in knitting together the modern, highly integrated world economy that we livein and know of today.And the sixth and final of these waves of globalization that I’ll discuss, it won’tbe the last one, but it is the globalization that is underway today.I believe it’s a new globalization, after the Anglo-American period in which we haveyet another geopolitical environment.We have yet a new technological age.We have yet new challenges for our generation and the generations to come in the 21st Centurythat really define this period as being yet the start of another new wave of globalization.Exciting, it’s the story of humanity.Let’s get into it.First, what do I mean by globalization?Of course, what I mean is the integration of basic structures of society over largegeographical areas.And in the modern world, across national boundaries and regional boundaries that may include anumber of nations in one part of the world.How are our societies linked together?They’re linked together in multiple ways, obviously.They’re linked together through the trade of goods and services.When we buy a product from halfway around the world, or when we buy a service, for example,as a tourist visiting another part of the world, they are linked together through anow-global financial system where banks in one country lend to banks in other countrieswhich then on lend to buyers and sellers of goods and services, linking together financeof course in a trillions and trillions of dollar global financial system.It’s a system so intertwined that when a bad accident happens in one place, a financialpanic such as exploded in September, 2008 with the failure of a bank in the United States,it quickly spread throughout the entire world.We’re linked in production systems, a major company, say one of our iconic companies inthe world today, Apple, producing iPhones and computers and many other products.may produce the components of those products in dozens of countries, assemble them in multiplecountries, ship them around the world in what we call a global value chain.And that’s a value chain across companies and across countries and across stages ofdevelopment and stages of production of a particular product.We’re linked together in ideas.


An idea that emerges in one place in the world, whether it’s the scientific idea, an artisticidea, a new ideology, a new concept, a new kind of entertainment, nowadays spreads rapidlythroughout the world, but throughout human history, ideas have spread.Religious ideas, philosophical ideas, scientific ideas spread throughout the world.We’re linked through migration.People move.And while we’re very much aware today of refugees and migrants often trying to escapewar or environmental disasters and find their way to safety, migration has been absolutelyat the essence of the human experience for as long as we have been homo sapiens, as longas we have been human beings.Even our ancestors to homo sapiens, other human, members of the human genus were ofcourse migrating and moving around the world for hundreds and hundreds of thousands ofyears, millions of years indeed.And finally we’re linked together by geopolitics.Politics does not stop at a national boundary, it could never stop at a national boundary.The issues of national security, war and peace, safety from dangers from other regions andso forth, this is again, a part of humanity.Globalization means the interconnectedness of goods, services, finance, ideas, peoplein their movement, geopolitics and the interaction of nation states.And we feel today this strong interdependence but interdependence has been a feature ofhuman society forever.We didn’t invent globalization, but we do have, as has been true throughout history,our own distinct version of globalization.What you’re looking at here is one rendering of the great dispersal, the first wave ofglobalization, the out of Africa dispersal.While anthropologists and archaeologists continue to uncover new and very surprising facts aboutthe evolution of our species, it remains the overwhelming view that homo sapiens are ourspecies, emerged in Africa in evolution of the recent hundreds of thousands of years.And then dispersed from Africa to the rest of the world.And the genetic record increasingly is helping us to decipher that dispersal.But what this map shows is the estimated timing of arrival of the modern human species, homosapiens into Europe, into Asia, and into the Americas where it’s believed that...partof humanity from Asia crossed a land bridge perhaps 12,000 to 15,000 years ago when thesea level was much below the current level because more water was impounded in the icesheets, before the end of the last ice age.And then these populations dispersed throughout North and South America and became what wetoday would call the indigenous or native Amerindian populations of the Americas.The point is humanity during this dispersal reached all parts of the world from an outof Africa dispersal that may have started 125,000 years ago or a 100,000 years ago,still debated.And that culminated in the arrival of populations to the Americas, perhaps somewhere between10,000 and 20,000 years ago.Much still to learn on the details.One notable point when humanity arrived almost anywhere, it seems to have contributed, perhapstogether with climatic changes, to the extinction of other species.In Australia, when populations arrived in Australia, perhaps 40,000 to 50,000 yearsago many of the unique megafauna, the large animal population in Australia was drivento extinction.Best guess, humanity did it.It shows we may have a tendency towards environmental destruction.While we sometimes think romantically that indigenous populations live in harmony withnature, there is a lot of evidence that indigenous populations destroyed nature just as we aredestroying nature in our own time.This seems to be the case as well in the Americas.When the Amerindian populations, as we would call them today, arrived from Asia between10,000 and 20,000 years ago, date still debated, it seems to coincide with the extinction of


the great megafauna, the large land mammals of the Americas, the wooly mammoth and thewild horse being two dramatic examples.Why these species went extinct is much debated.Was it climatic changes at the end of the last ice age?Was it the arrival of humanity?Nobody knows for sure, best guess; a combination of the two.But it is a warning.The Americas, North America was filled with horses.But those horses went extinct around 10,000 or 11,000 years ago.And that meant that the populations of the Americas did not have the benefit of horsesfor work and for transportation for 10,000 years, until the European conquerors cameon horseback and had such advantages of power and military force that they were able torepress and even commit genocide on the local populations.It seems to be the case that homo sapiens, our species, also may have been the leadingcause of the extinction of our closest relatives, other human species, especially the Neanderthal.We now know that homo sapiens and the Neanderthal coexisted in Europe 30,000 to 40,000 yearsago.The Neanderthals went extinct but they remained part of us, modern species, in that almostall of humanity outside of Africa still carries in our genes, a fraction, small fraction ofgenes distinctive to the Neanderthal population.So there was interbreeding, but also perhaps mass murder, or at least a competition forfood and other scarce resources that ended up with homo sapiens driving the Neanderthalsto extinction.The second great wave of globalization is the Neolithic Revolution.And here you’re looking at a map where the green-shaded areas are the places where agriculturestarted.What do we know?We know that agriculture was a kind of invention.It was a process of learning and invention and breeding of wild species so that the humansbegan deliberately to grow and cultivate crops rather than simply to gather the natural outputof crops.And this process of developing the capacity for settled agriculture occurred independentlyin many parts of the world.So this is a case of multiple discoveries over a few thousand years, roughly at a similartime at the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the modern climate period calledthe Holocene, agriculture began to develop.In the Eurasian context, in two major sites, the Fertile Crescent of what is now Iraq andbetween the Tigris and Euphrates, where wheat cultivation began.And in China, both in the Yellow Sea and the Yangtze River basins where millet and ricebegan to be cultivated.In the Americas, the invention of agriculture in North America was around maize.In the southwest of what is today’s United States and in parts of Mexico and in SouthAmerica in the highlands of the Andes, the basis of potato cultivation.The idea is that agriculture was invented and then diffused.Diffused means that an invention spreads geographically.This is a fundamental part of globalization; invention in one place, diffusion to otherparts of the world.When it comes to crops, the diffusion is guided by geography because crops like wheat cangrow only in cool places but not in the tropics.Grains like rice grow especially in certain ecological areas, the subtropics, or monsoonenvironments with plenty of water and so forth.But the diffusion is carried by observation, imitation and the migration of people themselves.The third great era of globalization that we would like to study are the ancient empires,the Roman Empire that you see on the map around the Mediterranean basin.The Han Empire that you see in east Asia where China was unified as a great nation with boundariesthat are similar to China today.


The Parthian Empire of today’s Iran and a civilization that has played a rich andgreat role in human history for 2,500 years plus.What’s notable about this wave of globalization is massive empires.No longer small villages, but now great empires and global scale trade, massive trade betweenAsia and Europe, over land, over the famed Silk Roads and land routes.Of course, not the scale of trade and integration made possible by modern transport, but stillalready 2,000 years ago a real globalization, not that connected the Old World and the Americas,that would still take 1,500 years more to arrive with ocean-based navigation, but connectingEurope, Asia and parts of Africa in global trade already two millennia ago.With the discoveries of ocean-based navigation between Europe and the newly Americas, followingChristopher Columbus’ 1492 voyage and then all of the voyages that followed with thesea routes between Europe and Asia that Vasco da Gama first pioneered in 1498, the entireworld became integrated in an era of globalization that one could say was really the beginningof modern globalization, in which all parts of the world, Europe, Asia, Africa, NorthAmerica, South America were now part of a global system of trade and increasingly aglobal system of technology and ideas, as well.In the last 200 years, a new phase arose, mainly because of a dramatic breakthroughof technology that we’ll be looking at, the arrival of the modern era of energy, startingwith the steam engine and the progenitor of that breakthrough, the United Kingdom, reallybecame the major power of the world.And I would say, overwhelmingly because of that technological lead.And with the advent of the modern industrial age, Britain became the predominant powerfor 150 years, roughly from the start of the 19th Century to the middle of the 20th Centuryand then handed the baton to the United States, a country that had its roots in Britain, ofcourse.And one could say that the Anglo-American world, first the U.K., then the United States,dominated the world scene in an industrial age that lasted from roughly the beginningof the 19th Century, say 1800, till the end of the 20th Century, at roughly the year 2000.Then I believe we have entered a new era, an era of the 21st Century, no longer an Anglo-Americanworld, now a world in which power is diffuse, in which there are more centers of power andin which yet a new wave of technology, information technology is again changing the nature, themeaning, the drivers and the patterns of globalization.What do we learn from this very, very quick overview that extends for a 100,000 years?What do we make of this?First, change is global scale and it has been for our species from the start.The mechanisms of innovation and diffusion are fundamental.What gets invented in one place diffuses widely, maybe according to ecological characteristicswhere food can be grown or maybe globally, such as when the invention of the mobile phonebecame a worldwide technology within a very short period of time.Change comes very, very quickly.And this I think is very important for us to understand.We have seen many unexpected changes at dramatic global scale take place that were almost unanticipatedand yet with global repercussions in a short period of time.I’ll just cite a few that we’ll look at throughout this mini course.We went from the age of European imperialism in Africa, which began in the 1880s, to thedecolonization of Africa and the rise of independent nation states in Africa roughly in three-quartersof a century.Dramatic, fundamental, geopolitical change.We went from the invention of the Soviet Union with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 andthe birth of the Soviet Union itself in the early 1920s, to the sudden end and dissolutionof the Soviet Union in 1991, a shocking event, little anticipated, global ramifications.We went from British supremacy with great British power and influence and seeming predominancearound 1913 to essentially the end of the British Empire just four decades later.Unimaginable.Unthinkable.And yet it’s part of our most modern history.


And perhaps we’re in a similar way seeing a rapid relative decline of American power.America thought it would run the show after the decline of the British Empire, but America’spower and weight in the world is clearly being challenged and in relative terms, other partsof the world, and notably east Asia, are becoming major, major forces of geopolitics, of technology,of the world economy and that too has proceeded very rapidly.These are the forces that we need to grapple with.What is the nature of global change?Why does it occur?Why does it occur so suddenly?What are the dangers that take place when these mega disruptions occur?One thing we can say is that a lot of these disruptions have been occasioned by war.And that is a reality that I believe has to be fundamental to our investigation.We can’t afford another global war.We’ve had several of them, global scale wars, but now we have the technology in whichanother such war could be the very end of our species.And I often refer to the wise words of President John F. Kennedy who almost definedour modern existential reality: “The world is very different now, for man holds in hismoral hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”That is our globalization.We can’t afford to have the kinds of disruptions that we had in the past lest we lose everything.With that in mind, with the risks that disruption brings, conflict, I want us to keep in mindthree great questions as we use our backward look at globalization to try to gain insightsfor the future of globalization in this century.First, can the world truly choose a path of shared prosperity, social inclusion for all,and environmental sustainability in this sixth wave of globalization of the 21st Century?That we could say is the challenge of sustainable development.Second, how should our global governance, our geopolitics be organized if it is trueas seems likely that the Anglo-American age has ended and we are now in a truly multi-polarworld where there are important powers throughout the world that need to find new ways to cooperate?And third, and fundamentally, is global peace possible?And on what model of statecraft and on global cooperation can we build an era of globalpeace?


1.2 PRIME DRIVERS 18 minutes Thought-provoking questions:

o What are the main drivers of change that happen at a global scale?o Is war a major driver of change? Why or why not?

In this chapter, I want to talk about some of the prime drivers of global scale changeand especially the technological changes that have been core to these waves of globalization.Where do they come from?How do they diffuse?What are the fundamental patterns of global scale change that affect the dynamics of innovationand diffusion?I think we can identify a kind of checklist, where as an analyst you would want to lookat a variety of basic drivers of change to ask whether that particular set of driversor that subset of the forces of change are playing an important role in a given historicalperiod.I’ll start with technology.The ability to use, invent and use tools to produce goods and services, to fight wars,to cure disease and to address other human needs.1 Technological change through innovation and diffusion is without question one of the fundamentaldrivers of global scale change in any era.And one can identify with each of these waves of globalization, basic technologies thatplayed a key role.In the Neolithic Revolution, for example, the invention of agriculture itself.In the Age of Navigation after Columbus and Vasco da Gama’s voyages of course navigationand naval technology in general, but also military technology in what’s sometimescalled the Gunpowder Age played a fundamental role in the reshaping of geopolitics and thetechnology of war itself.In our era, clearly the information revolution, computation, connectivity are reshaping theworld economy Within technology we can think of particularcategories of technology.Military technology has always played a fundamental shaping role in global change.And if one place in the world gains even a transitory military advantage for some reasonit can have a sudden capacity to conquer other parts of the world.Transport technology is fundamental for trade, for movement of people, movement of goodsand services.Places that have been able to benefit from the technology of the horse, whether ridingthe horse or the horse for motive power, mobilizing energy for industrial transformation or fortransportation has repeatedly shaped global change.And it’s not surprising that the era of industrialization, what I have called thefifth wave of globalization was fundamentally an energy revolution.The revolution sometimes called the change from the organic economy, where energy wasbasically what we ate for our human power or what we fed our animals for animal traction,to the energy embodied in coal, oil and gas, which changed the world, vastly multipliedwhat humans could produce.Information technology, othe diffusion of knowledge, the diffusion of technique, thediffusion of knowhow depends on the ability to share information.Word of mouth is one way, but books and now online diffusion of information, of courseare fundamental inventions of humanity that transformed the world.No doubt the invention of movable type and the printing press of Guttenberg in Europearound 1440 was a fundamental shaper that then had consequences for the birth of theglobal era with Columbus and Vasco da Gama just a half century later.The mass production of books made possible the scientific revolution.Today the internet is creating its own revolution and we don’t understand yet the consequencesfor society, for geopolitics, for statecraft, for warfare.The physical environment, of course, creates literally the channels, the pathways, the


mountain passes through which technology and change occur.2 And I will illustrate how climate zones are definers of pathways of diffusion. (Pathways)If you look at the diffusion of wheat production, of course, it diffuses within an ecologicalband where wheat can be grown.That’s cooler areas, not into the tropics.Whereas maize production diffused within the tropical regions because with the differentphotosynthetic pathway of maize, that’s a crop that grows in a much warmer climate.Disease patterns are profoundly determined by climate.Malaria is a warm temperature disease, either hot summers in the higher latitudes, or yearround in the more equatorial latitudes of the tropics.And so the physical climate, the topography, the mountains, the access to navigable rivers,the disease epidemiology shaped by climate, the availability or absence of wood for buildingships, for building homes or the presence or absence of valuable minerals, are all fundamentaldrivers of both technology use themselves and patterns of diffusion of new inventionswhen they come.3 Demography is a key shaper of global change. (DRIVER)Where are populations growing, where are populations declining?Where are populations young, dynamic, on the move, where are populations older and perhapsless dynamic?Where are populations moving into cities, urbanization, where are they concentratedin rural areas?Where are the sources of out-migration, where are the receiving countries for in-migration?Demographic change and demographic imbalances, when regions have very different patternsof population growth, age structures, and so forth lead to dynamics of migration.Of course, war is a fundamental part of human history and a fundamental driver of change.War is destructive without question, but it is also an agent of technological innovation.It’s been one of the main reasons why states invest in research and development to developnew knowhow, new techniques for the purposes of national security or power in war.Conquests are ways that ideas and technologies have diffused over time.Conquests have also been reasons that technologies have stopped because conquered societies lackthe freedom of maneuver to achieve their own economic development.Ideology, revolutionary fervor is another major driver of global scale change.When Islam spread from Mecca and Medina throughout North Africa into the Iberian peninsula, intocentral Asia, heading east into the Middle East and into western Asia, the ideas of Islamwere carried with revolutionary fervor.Religion became a vehicle of global change, it became a carrier of new concepts, of statecraft,and also it created a civilization in which ideas, scientific and other ideas would diffusewith a common language, a common cultural framework, a set of institutions, for example,centers of learning in universities.And this is repeated throughout history.Political institutions, how we organize and manage power within our societies.What the great sociologist Max Weber called the Monopoly of Legitimate Violence, he statethat has supposedly the legitimate power within a geographical area.How that is organized is of course a major factor in the diffusion of global scale change.When a state power closes its national boundaries for example, that can block the diffusionof ideas and technology, that can be a barrier to change, or it can leave a nation or a regionfar behind other countries in technological advance, for example, thereby shaping thepatterns of global scale change.And of course, cultural institutions, how we view our place in the cosmos are fundamental.And one of the great changes of culture in the last 500 years is the rise of scienceas a self-understood activity of exploring the laws of nature and then using the know-howfrom those laws of nature to pursue in a directed way new technologies for human well-being.And that scientific revolution of modern science began in western Europe and it is one of thefactors for the world economy being reshaped by western Europe and eventually by the Anglo-Americanworld because of that unique force of cultural change with the scientific revolution.So this is a checklist of global drivers, they don’t play an equal role in all historical


episodes, but they do help to guide your consideration of studying history or considering our currentsituation from a very rich, multifaceted set of perspectives.Now I think when one studies in particular technological change it is very good to havein mind the basic idea of innovation and diffusion.Innovation is the first invention and then application.And then diffusion is the way that that innovation spreads to other places in the world.When we think about innovation and diffusion as fundamental parts of global change, let’sremember a few key points.First, that the pathways of diffusion are determined by physical geography. (AND HUMAN)Institutions are conduits of technological knowhow.Universities have played a role as being carriers and transmitters of new ideas and technologies.

There is a basic concept that I believe to be crucial in understanding economic developmentin general and global change in our context, and that is the idea of catching up. (CAPITAL MOBILIZATION)When a new technology has been deployed in one place in the world, but not yet in another,you have a leader and a laggard region from the perspective of that technology.And that gives at least the potential for a quick catching-up by the lagging region.That is precisely why certain parts of the developing world have been able to achieveastounding rates of economic growth that were never seen in earlier centuries.China, for example, we know achieved approximately 10% per year aggregate economic growth from1978 until around 2013.And that means that for roughly 35 years the Chinese economy was doubling every seven years.And that was possible because of this catching up phenomenon.There’s another concept that’s very important and that’s leapfrogging.And that means not only does the laggard gradually close the gap with the leader, but the laggardsays, I don’t have to follow the leader, the new technology allows me to leapfrog,so I don’t have to go through all of the steps that the leader went through.Let me take one example right now, ePayments, using our mobile phones to make payments.In eastern Africa, in Kenya, ePayments became a leapfrog technology with the invention ofM-Pesa or mobile money, used for payments in Kenya.And as a visitor to Kenya frequently, I marveled at the ease of ePayments in Kenya were inmy own home in Manhattan, in New York City, it really wasn’t much present yet.Kenya had successfully leapfrogged on this technology.And then a final concept on technological change that I think is extremely importantis a difference of self-organizing evolutionary change and directed technological change.(DEVELOPMENTALISM)What happens when tinkerers and inventors have ideas and they innovate, they becomeentrepreneurs, they bring these ideas to the market.And perhaps they invent a new industry in this way.Directed technological change comes when it’s decided we need a technology that has thisparticular capability.And then research and development activities are directed towards making that breakthrough.That, in fact, is how the internet itself came about, because during the 1960s, militarystrategists in the United States worried about how to keep communication between computersin the event of war, and more generally, how to connect computers that might be importantfor national security, even in a peacetime context.And the U.S. government thereby funded a lot of the early technological work, the researchand development to develop the protocols and the hardware and software of the internetitself.That was an example of directed technological change.There’s perhaps a lot more directed change than we acknowledge, especially in the modernera where technology is firmly grounded on cutting-edge science and cutting-edge scienceto an important extent is funded by the state.All of this suggests some basic lessons in the diffusion and catch-up process.The role of physical geography, the importance of low transport costs to connect a regionwith the rest of the world.The two sides of war, both sometimes spreading technology, often impeding the spread of technology.


The fact of learning by doing and the ability to leapfrog, or at least rapidly close thegap, between a laggard and a leader.And finally, the idea of state driven, top-down you might say, directed technological changeas a core feature of large-scale technological change.Well, all of this I believe can be used to help us understand some of the deep principles,the consistent drivers of globalization at least over the most recent four waves of globalizationthat in my terminology and dating is a 2000-year global human history, from the great landbased empires in Roman and Han imperial times up until today.


CHAPTER 1.3 THE EURASIAN ADVANTAGE 16minThought-provoking questions:

o Why is it helpful to look at climate zones to better understand the spread of technologies and ideas?

o What region of the world has consistently shaped the dynamics of global development since ancient times?

In this chapter, I want to talk about one particular part of the world and that is themid-latitudes of Eurasia.Take a look at the map.We can think of the world’s land areas in distinctive parts.There is Europe and Asia, part of the largest land mass, Eurasia.And the boundaries between Europe and Asia are conventionally given by the Ural Mountains.But that large land mass has been at the core of so much of global change, of technologicaldynamism, and of world power for so long that there is a very special and crucial role thatwe need to understand.Of course, there is Africa, also, our original home, the cradle of humanity, the origin ofall homo sapiens.Now with a population that is about one-seventh of humanity, but rising quickly so that Africacould become a quarter of all of humanity or even a third of the total human populationby the end of the 21st Century.Then there are the Americas, North and South America, which from 13,000 years ago roughlyuntil perhaps 1000 A.D. were completely cut off in human history from what was happeningin the old world of Europe, Asia and Africa.Some Viking settlements about a thousand years ago came from Scandinavia, Iceland and Greenlandto settle briefly in northeast Canada, in Newfoundland.But those settlements were very short-lived and forgotten.And it was really with the discovery of the sea route that Christopher Columbus pioneeredin 1492 that the links of the Old World and the Americas became deeply, rapidly, inextricablyintertwined.Oceania with Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands, also was inhabited by humanity50,000 years ago, but the indigenous populations were largely separated from the dynamics ofchange in Eurasia, again until the Europeans came and began to colonize Australia throughimperial rule in the 18th Century.What I want to focus on in this chapter is the distinctive history of this great landmass, Eurasia.And that land mass has been home typically to at least three-quarters, if not more, ofall of the human population.China and India dating back for millennia have been the most populous parts of the world,the great monsoon rains and the high productivity of rice-fed agriculture supported relativelylarge population densities throughout south Asia, southeast Asia and east Asia for atleast the last two millennia.Eurasia as a whole has been a connected land based region, home to the preponderance ofthe world economy and the world’s population.And by being a land-based contiguous area, that has facilitated trade and the exchangeof ideas for millennia, at least we know since the active interchange between the Roman Empireand Han, China, 2000 years ago.Part of Eurasia has had a distinctive leadership role.Some of Eurasia is desert and almost uninhabited.Some of it is tundra, frozen throughout the year with very small populations living there,butmost of the population has been in a subtropical band of latitude and climate zone that somehistorians have christened, “the lucky latitudes.”This is one map that has roughly defined the so-called lucky latitudes, because an enormousamount of human history, population, and technological innovation has occurred in those lucky latitudes.It is in those lucky latitudes that ideas have not only been innovated, but have been


able to diffuse within a band that shares enough commonality of climate zone, of transportconditions, of disease burden and other characteristics to make it similar enough to be not a homogeneousregion by any means, but a region that can share ideas and that has exchanged ideas formillennia.It’s helpful to look at the climate zones of the world.This is a complicated, I find, and a very beautiful map, of one climate classificationcalled the Köppen-Geiger classification.It’s a classification, color coded in this world map, that defines different regionsof the world.For example, whether they have a very low level of rainfall, that becomes one category,the so-called, B climate regions which here are yellow and beige.Those are the desert regions, or the grassland regions of low rainfall.Or regions of moderate temperature that have both winters and summers, the sometimes calledtemperate zones.Those are generally in the classification system here, the C and D climate zones.And they have warm enough summers to grow crops and cold enough winters for freezingtemperatures and usually no cultivation in those seasons.Such climates on this map are shown in green.Light green areas around the Mediterranean basin for example, in what is not surprisinglycalled the Mediterranean climate of wet winters and dry summers.Great for growing grapes for excellent wine, famous in the Mediterranean region.Or the darker green areas which generally are more humid throughout the year.So without that dry summer season.And you can see that the eastern seaboard of the United States, much of Europe, coastalChina are in that green temperate region.Well, if you look at the lucky latitudes of Eurasia, those are generally B and C climatezones, meaning that in part they are the steppe lands or the grasslands where animals cangraze, where horses can thrive and where grasslands support animal herding.And the darker green areas, where high population densities can grow food with especially staplegrains like wheat and rice with very high productivity and therefore, can support highpopulation densities.


What’s notable about the lucky latitudes of Eurasia is that not only are they congenialin general for animal husbandry and also for staple crop production, but they are sufficientlywarm, that they’re not the punishing climate of the arboreal north, but they are not sohot that they introduce the range of tropical disease burdens like year-round endemic malariaor trypanosomiasis, sleeping sickness, which made it very, very difficult for populationsin tropical Africa.So the lucky latitudes are kind of the happy middle.Not too cold, not too warm.Both crops and animal production.And with a shared band of shared climate that stretches all the way from Europe in the westto Asia in the east.Jared Diamond, one of the great explicators of economic history and economic developmentin our time, has emphasized that this Eurasian shared ecology is the longest stretch of contiguousshared eco-zone and climate zone in the world.Eurasia he’s pointed out as shown in this map lies broadly speaking in an east-westorientation, which from a climate perspective, referring back to the Koppen-Geiger climateclassification, means a shared climate across a shared latitude, broadly speaking.Whereas the Americas and Africa are more along a north-south axis.That means cutting from the North and the South Pole at the extremes all the way tothe tropical equator so that regions like the Americas or like Africa have many, manydifferent climate zones.And that means that diffusion of agricultural knowhow or public health remedies for diseasedon’t transmit so easily across ecological zones.The lucky latitudes, in short, seem to be lucky because they have a large space forsharing knowledge, innovations in one place can diffuse to 10,000 kilometers away.


Wheat can be grown all of the way from Portugal in the west all the way to the east coastof China, 10,000 kilometers away.So lots of innovation in that band.A moderate or temperate climate which avoids the extreme dangers, transport conditionswhich facilitated trade, whether it was overland trade of the Silk Roads for the last 2000years or the sea- based navigation that commenced with Vasco da Gama’s voyage from the Iberianpeninsula around the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of Africa, into the Indian Oceanand thereby to south Asia and to east Asia, but enabling a large band of exchange of ideasand technology.These lucky latitudes have thereby been the major propellant of core technologies in thisworld.They have been lucky to be facilitated for 2000 years by modern transport, if I couldcall it that, of the use of horses which flourish in the steppes of Asia and thereby have playeda role fundamentally in China, Europe, in western Asia throughout history and therebyhave been available whereas horses could not survive the tropical climates of Africa andhorses alas, had been driven to extinction with the arrival of the populations from Asiainto the Americas, 10,000 to 15,000 years ago.And so the lucky latitudes really, really were lucky.But another fact is shown here and these, this is a map of coal deposits.The red areas are known geologic deposits of coal.


With the invention of the steam engine in the 18th Century and its adoption in England,in the beginning of the Industrial Age, made possible by the steam engine, the presenceof coal by itself became a fundamental advantage in the diffusion of industrial knowhow.Places with coal could develop heavy industry.Places without coal had a much greater disadvantage.Lo and behold, those lucky latitudes of Eurasia were lucky once again, because not only didthey avoid the extremes of temperature, not only did they have the long transport networkwhere ideas could flow from east to west, not only did they avoid the worst extremesof disease, they also turned out by chance to have lots of coal.And so many parts of Eurasia again, of course western Europe, from the home of the IndustrialRevolution in England and down the Rhine Valley into Germany and in parts of European Russia,parts of India and China, all were able to benefit from their coal deposits.Alas, look at poor Africa in this story and South America, just by dint of geologic quirk,very little coal deposits in Africa.Only in north Africa and in southern Africa, all the way in the south of Africa were thereany significant coal deposits.Similarly in South America, not so much coal available.And so this became in the last two centuries yet another advantage of the lucky latitudes.What can we conclude from this?When we look at history, when we look at the role of China as a great progenitor of technologiesfor roughly 500 years, from 1000 to 1500 A.D., when we look at the role of western Europein the last 500 years of globalization, this part of the world which took the technologicallead, took the geopolitical lead that went along with its military might and its industrialpower, had certain underlying geological and other geographical advantages, disease, cropsproductivity, mixed animal husbandry and crops production, then coal in the 19th and 20thCenturies that gave it certain advantages and helped shape the dynamics of global development.They’re not called the "lucky latitudes" for no reason.There is real historical evidence that this part of the world has been lucky.It gave it many advantages in history and that’s where we see a lot of the innovationthat created the waves of technological change, at least over the 2000 years of our investigation.


CHAPTER 1.4: the classical world 14 minThought-provoking questions:

o Both the Roman Empire and the Chinese Han Empire spread mainly toward their respective East and West, rather than to their North or South. Why is this relevant?

o What are the advantages of east/west empire expansion?In this chapter, I want to talk about what I’ve called the third wave of globalization.That’s the classical age of the Roman Empire, its contemporaneous empire in China, the HanEmpire and other geopolitics of that time.And I want to use this not to give a deep explanation of that history, but rather toillustrate the role of physical ecology in shaping what we look at as mainly geopoliticsor imperial dynamics.In fact, the empires of Rome and of China and many, many similar cases throughout history,are to a tremendous extent ecologically shaped in ways that perhaps are under-appreciated.Let’s look at the Roman Empire at its maximum extent, roughly around 117 A.D. during thetime of Emperor Trajan.And what you see is first of all, a characteristic of empires that might seem arbitrary at thestart, but has a very deep base and that is that the Roman Empire lies mostly east-west.The extent from the Atlantic coast in the west to the eastern Mediterranean is far greaterthan the north-south extent of the empire.And if you look at the map of the Roman Empire at its maximum extent and compare it to theclimate zones that we have seen with the so-called Köppen-Geiger climate classification shownin the light green in this map, you quickly realize that the Roman Empire is almost definedby its climatology.This is not surprisingly a Mediterranean climate.Remember that a Mediterranean climate is a subtropical climate that has the characteristicthat it is cool, but not freezing in the winter months and quite rainy and warm and very sunnyand typically dry.And where Rome was able to reach and conquer was where the ecology supported the base ofRoman life.What are the great crops of the Roman Empire?Well, wheat is the staple and wheat grows very well in exactly this Mediterranean climate.We think of this today as the Mediterranean diet with olive oil and the olive trees andthat is the ecological extent of where the olive growing is.Most famous perhaps of all and most pleasurable is the winemaking, because wine is favoredby a Mediterranean climate.Of course, not only in the Mediterranean basin, but also the Mediterranean climate of California,which is another example of a cool, wet winter and a dry, sunny summer in the Napa Valleyof California.And one can find similar ecological niches in Chile, on the west coast of South Americaor the west coast of Australia.And so the Roman Empire, one could say, in a way was defined by its wheat, its olives,and its winegrowing.Of course that’s not the only reason why the generals of the Roman Empire stopped theirconquests at these boundaries.To go south of that thin band of temperate zone of north Africa meant getting to thedesert.The desert is a completely different ecology.It doesn’t support a high density population.It can’t support crop production, it introduces multiple new hazards.It requires camel-rearing rather than the horsemanship of the Roman Empire.To go north of the Rhine and into the heavy soils of northern Europe and the much coldertemperatures required technologies that were not available in Roman times.


Heavier plows and new ways to farm and to clear very heavy forests that really wouldn’tbe developed adequately for hundreds of years after the demise of the western Roman Empire.So this east-west orientation is really a climate zone orientation, which in turn isan agro-ecological and a disease epidemiological orientation.It is an animal husbandry orientation because this is a range where cows and where goatsand sheep and horses familiar to the mixed farming of the Roman Empire could thrive.South and north, it becomes much more complicated.This pattern I want to insist is very common to empires throughout history.Look at where they are, look at what their boundaries are.Lo and behold, there are reasons for those boundaries, why they didn’t extend northor south or into distinctive ecological zones.We could take another look, in this case, at Alexander’s conquests which became theHellenic age after Alexander’s death and then the division of his empire into successorstates.Look at its orientation.Again, this is an east-west orientation.It’s sharing a common ecological zone.It is an ecology where horses can play their military role, their transport role, wheremixed animal husbandry in western Asia, in the Levant or the eastern Mediterranean, inAnatolia and western Asia, today’s Turkey, all can be part of a shared technologicalspace of crops, disease burden, animals for traction and for mixed agriculture and fortransport conditions, as well.If we look at China, the Han Empire and look at the maximum extent of the Han Empire, whatdo we see?We again see an east-west orientation.This is again, the subtropical and temperate climate, both the relatively warmer climates,but not in the tropics and avoiding the more poleward, cold climates that enabled Chinato thrive and to create a unified state.China, of course, is a civilization that has been based on its great the rivers.With both the northern Yellow River and the more southern Yangtze River being the cradleof Chinese civilization.The northern zones, being more millet and wheat production, and the more southern farmingareas around the Yangtze being rice cultivation.But once again, one sees that China both in its ancient imperial history and up untiltoday really bridges the temperate climate zones and its southern boundary, until today,is a tropical boundary, because the big distinction of today’s China and what’s sometimescalled Indochina, the countries of Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, that southernboundary is the boundary to the tropical climates.Distinctive agriculture, distinctive disease conditions, distinctive animal husbandry patterns,and though Chinese generals did several times try to invade and conquer, Vietnam, they neversucceeded in doing so.And one wonders whether part of the story was that they were fighting a climate as wellas fighting a strong resistance from the Vietnamese throughout their history.And that it was the ecology as well as the psychology that delimited the Chinese imperialareas.We can see in later conquests, both the Hun Empire, these are people from the steppesregions that created a huge land based empire north of the lucky latitudes, mainly in thesteppe zones.They became, of course, famed for their military valor and their capacity to conquer and toplunder in the waning days of the western Roman Empire.But they are also an ecologically conditioned people, in this case, people of the steppesregion.And the Huns of the 5th Century will be followed by the Mongols of the 12th and 13th Centuriesas people of the steppe region with vast capacity to conquer based on a horse-based civilizationthat itself is inherently a grassland civilization.The essence of a horse-based civilization is to be able to feed the horses and to have


them in an ecological zone that they can survive.And that of course means plenty of pastureland for the horses and the great steppe regions.That is the so-called B climate zone that one can see in the climate map has definedthe steppes of Eurasia and has given rise throughout history to periods of great militaryvictory and vast but short-lived land based empires of the Huns, the Mongols, and similarpopulations from the steppe region.Well, these are the east-west great empires sharing a temperate zone ecology, able totransmit agricultural technologies and other know-how, sharing other features of diseaseecology and even mineral and physical geography that made it possible for Eurasia to becomean integrated trading region already more than 2000 years ago.And the great connector of that trade was the steppes of Asia, the grassland regionsthat supported horsemanship and horse-base transport.These became the Silk Roads that linked Europe and Asia in history, that transmitted culture,technology, and armies throughout history.I think it’s right to say that up to and only until the invention of the steam-basedlocomotive and then the internal combustion engine in the 19th Century, the world’shighways were effectively the paths for horsemanship and horse-based transport.And one could say that the steppes of Eurasia, the steppe lands, the grasslands of Eurasiawere the great highway system that integrated Eurasia during the 2000 years, up to the modernage and up to the advantages that came with the ocean-based navigation, starting in the16th Century.Well, these are just snippets to give some feel for how the history of humanity, thesegreat empires and their trade have these shapers of physical geography, of climate, of innovationand diffusion always for us to try to decipher and discern in our understanding of history,because these shapers of events continue in more recent history as I will now discussin future chapters.


MODULE 1: WAVES OF GLOBALIZATION 12.30 minCHAPTER 1.5: the medieval chinese miracleThought-provoking questions:

o Between the year 900 AD to approximately the mid 15th Century, was the direction of innovation predominantly flowing from East to West or from West to East?

o Why were the new technologies that were invented in China during the Song Dynasty period fundamental to the subsequent rise of Europe?

In this chapter, I want to bridge the ancient world of the Roman Empire with the world ofglobalization that commences with Columbus and Vasco da Gama in the last decade of the15th Century.And that means to look at the developments between the fall of the western Roman Empireand the emergence of the European Renaissance and the changes that it would bring.And once again, when we do this, we find how Eurasia and geography so much shape the historyof global scale change.I want to pick up our story of global scale change with the emergence of Islam as a globalreligion.What is amazing about this story, but I think very much pertinent to the way that I’mtrying to look at some of these underlying factors, is that Islam emerges quickly, suddenly,at a massive global scale.Indeed, over a period of just a couple of centuries.And very much in an ecologically shaped manner.When Muhammad makes the hijra to Medina in 622 and Islam emerges as a new religion andone that would then be carried by ideas and by conquest in the following decades, thespread of Islam both to the west, across north Africa and into Spain and to the east intotoday’s Middle East and western Asia is remarkably rapid.And as with the Roman Empire, and as with the Han Empire that we’ve looked at, aswith the Hun, massive steppe-based empire, the empire of the Islamic world and here I’mshowing in this map the third of the great caliphates, the Abbasid dynasty based in Baghdadis once again, an east-west empire, not because there’s any natural preference of east-westover north-south, except that east-west tracks ecological zones and ecological zones shapethe technological underpinnings of empires, of economies.And in the case of the Islamic world, this is a dryland civilization that hugs at itsoutward limit, the Mediterranean climate of dry summers and wet winters and into the steppe-landand desert zones and where we could say the transition from the horse in the Mediterraneanclimate to the camel in the Arab environment takes place.The conquests of Islam across north Africa and into Spain were shaped by armies carriedby horse and camel across north Africa.And the Arabic-based civilization and Arab-led civilization of the Islamic world in thisperiod is an ecologically shaped environment that began in the Hejaz of today’s SaudiArabia on the coast of the Red Sea and in the desert regions.Centuries later, a Turkic-based civilization would emerge, taking over a lot of this sameterritory and extending into southeastern Europe, what we call the Balkans region today,as well as Anatolia in the eastern Mediterranean.And that, of course, is named after the founder of this hugely successful Turkic empire, theOsman, which became the Ottoman Empire.And at its maximum extent you have another east-west empire, again characterized by acombination of Mediterranean climate and dryland climate to the south and to the east of theMediterranean climate.Once again, part of this is characteristic of the Roman Empire, which the Ottomans conqueredin the east when Constantinople fell in 1453 and became Istanbul, the capital of the OttomanEmpire.


Part of it is the conquest of the Arab lands, along the Red Sea and along north Africa.So that the Ottomans became heirs to the Arab-based civilizations.But once again, an ecologically-based region that was able to diffuse common agriculturaltechnologies, knowhow, animal herdsmanship, the use of the horse and the camel, militarytechnologies that shaped together the Ottoman Empire in the way that they had shaped theAbbasid Empire and the way that they had shaped the Roman Empire in the past.And all of these civilizations, especially these bridging civilizations of the MiddleEast, the Islamic world and the Turkish world, carried knowledge from east Asia and southAsia to Europe and hosted travelers like Marco Polo on their way from Europe to east Asia.And they played not only a role in their own right innovation of technology, but they playeda bridging role, as well, that was fundamental, along those lucky latitudes of Eurasia withknowledge diffusing from west to east and from east to west.And perhaps one of the most remarkable periods of human history, technological innovation,and technological diffusion, in a way forgotten now in our common discussion, but one of thepinnacles of civilization was the period of the Chinese Song Dynasty from 970 A.D. till1279 A.D., until the Song Dynasty fell to the Mongol conquest.And what makes this period of Chinese history, the Song Dynasty so remarkable is that itwas in its way an apogee of global technological innovation and the diffusion of those technologies,which took centuries in many cases, was absolutely fundamental to the rise of Europe that wouldfollow.And Europe became proficient, the master, the owner of a lot of the technologies thatwere first pioneered and developed in the Song Dynasty, so much so that Europe claimedcredit for them when the credit squarely belonged with China in historical terms.What are some of these great innovations?Of course the use of the compass especially for ocean-based navigation is a great Chineseinvention that became fundamental for all navigation, but was used by the European navigatorsas they began their age of exploration centuries after the compass was in use in Song China.The advent of a market economy, private ownership, the use of paper currency as an efficientmeans for monetizing a market economy could be considered a Song Dynasty invention.Certainly it was a case of massive and fruitful deployment of this know-how.It’s arguable that movable type and the printing press emerged first in the Song Dynastyand some of the knowledge and techniques gradually diffused to Europe where Guttenberg was ableto integrate them in his vision in northern Germany in 1440 to invent the printing pressin the European context, but certainly printing with the movable type was used in China duringthe Song period.And the diffusion of that know-how played a role in the reinvention of the technologyand the uptake of the technology in Europe centuries later.Many institutions of banking, insurance, joint stock companies, find their examples and innovationduring the Song period, which was to an important extent a market-based economy of a flourishingof living standards, population increase, internal peace, institutional innovation andtechnological innovation that we can only marvel at in the reflection of history.Great artistic inventions and the development of fine porcelain which became one of thefavored products for importation in Europe reaches an apogee of knowhow during the Songperiod.Mechanical clocks and other mechanical devices are developed during the Song period and spreadalong the lucky latitudes through Arabic civilization, through the Ottoman Empire to Venice and tothe rest of western Europe.So this was the period from 900, relatively, to probably the middle of the 15th Centuryand the end of the 15th Century where the overwhelming direction of technological innovationwas coming from east to west, where any observer at the time standing in 1450 on the eve ofthe fall of the eastern Roman Empire, the fall of Constantinople, to become the newcapital of the Ottoman Empire, watching the role of China as the great innovator for Eurasia,would have predicted that China would long dominate the world scene as the world’smost populous country, the technologically advanced country, the country that would continueto be world leader.But, in fact, this phase of history was drawing to an end, a rather abrupt and surprising


end.And within a century or two, in the 1500s and the 1600s, the rise of the west becamethe dominant development of global change.That’s the next wave of globalization that I want to explore, what I’ve called thefourth wave of globalization that begins with ocean-based globalization at the time of Columbusand Vasco da Gama.In the next module we will turn to that era.

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