The Web Beneath the World

Consider the shirt on your back. If it is like most garments sold in the world today, its cotton was grown in a field in India, Pakistan, or West Africa. The field was planted with seeds developed in part from varieties that originated in the Americas, carried east across the Atlantic after 1492 in the great biological upheaval that historians now call the Columbian Exchange. The cotton was harvested by hands, or increasingly by machines, and then transported to a factory whose looms descend in a direct mechanical lineage from the inventions of the English Midlands during the late eighteenth century. The thread was dyed with chemicals that trace back to the synthetic revolution in German chemistry of the 1850s and 1860s. The garment was sewn in a factory in Bangladesh or Vietnam or Ethiopia, cut to patterns first standardized for industrial production in the cotton mills of Manchester. It was shipped on a container vessel whose design and logistical systems were refined in the port of Newark, New Jersey, in the 1950s. It arrived at a warehouse and then a retail outlet whose inventory software is hosted on servers in Virginia or Oregon and managed through interfaces written in programming languages invented at American and British universities during the Cold War. You paid for it with a transaction cleared through a financial network whose institutional architecture was sketched out in the mountain resort of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944, when the world's finance ministers, exhausted by thirty years of war and depression, decided to try to build an international economic order that would not tear itself apart again.

None of this is invisible, exactly. The tags in our clothing tell us where things were made. The news tells us, periodically, about the factories that burn and the workers who die and the trade negotiations that collapse. But the cumulative depth of it — the sheer temporal and geographic span of the connections embedded in a single garment — is not something the human mind holds naturally. We are built for the immediate, the local, the face in front of us. History, at its most useful, is the discipline that forces us to look further.

What follows is an attempt to trace the connective tissue of human history: the history of exchange itself — the movement of goods and germs, of ideas and peoples, of silver and cotton and disease, across the map of the world over the last two thousand years. It is a history with no center. Or rather, its center keeps moving, which is the point.

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder complained, in the first century of the Common Era, that Roman gold was draining away to the East. He was right, and the complaint reveals something important: even at the height of Roman power, the empire's economy was embedded in a system larger than itself. Roman merchants purchased silk from China and spices from the Malabar Coast of India; Roman women wore Indian pearls and Chinese silk; Roman households burned Syrian incense and cooked with Vietnamese cinnamon. The surplus flowed in the other direction — in Roman gold coins, many of which have been found in archaeological digs across South India, as far as the trading port of Arikamedu near modern Puducherry.

This trade moved along a network of routes that later historians would romanticize under the name the Silk Road, though the name is misleading in two directions at once. It was a skein of routes, shifting with the seasons, the political fortunes of the steppe empires through whose territories they passed, and the relative profitability of different commodities at different moments. And silk was only one of many things that moved along it. What actually traveled the Silk Road, in rough order of historical importance, was: ideas, religions, and technologies first; luxury goods second; and germs — terribly, consequentially — third.

Buddhism traveled from India to China along these routes between roughly the first and fifth centuries of the Common Era, carried by monks and merchants who moved together because the roads were dangerous and pilgrimage and commerce were not, in that world, easily distinguishable from each other. Islam later moved along the same routes in both directions: west into Persia and Central Asia, east into the trading ports of Southeast Asia, where its arrival was mercantile before it was political. Paper-making techniques traveled from China westward after the Battle of Talas in 751, when Abbasid forces captured Chinese soldiers who happened to know the technology. Gunpowder moved in the other direction. Zero — perhaps the single most consequential mathematical invention in human history — was developed in India and traveled to the Islamic world and then to Europe, where it arrived in the twelfth century via translations of Arabic texts and transformed the possibilities of commerce, science, and eventually everything else.

The Silk Road, at its medieval height between roughly 600 and 1350, was organized around a series of relay systems in which goods rarely traveled the entire route in the hands of a single merchant. A bolt of silk might change hands a dozen times between Chang'an and Constantinople, moving through Sogdian intermediaries in Central Asia, Persian merchants in the western reaches, and Byzantine traders at the western terminus. The genius of the system was its redundancy: no single political disruption could sever it entirely.

What moved most efficiently along the Silk Road, it turned out, was pathogens. The great medieval pandemic, the one we call the Black Death in its European manifestation, originated — most historians now believe — in the rodent populations of Central Asia, possibly in the region around Lake Issyk-Kul in what is now Kyrgyzstan. It moved westward along the Silk Road routes in the 1340s, carried in the holds of Genoese trading ships from the Black Sea port of Kaffa to Sicily in 1347, and then across Europe in the following years, killing perhaps a third to a half of Europe's population.

The same pandemic devastated the Middle East, disrupted the Mongol successor states that had controlled Central Asia, and sent shock waves into China, which had experienced its own wave of plague mortality in the 1330s. The historian Timothy Brook has documented how the plague interacted with a prolonged climatic disruption — a period of cooling and increased monsoon variability now attributed to a phase of the Little Ice Age — to destabilize the Yuan Dynasty and set in motion the rebellions that would bring the Ming to power in 1368.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus made landfall in the Bahamas and initiated the most consequential biological event since the end of the last Ice Age. The historian Alfred Crosby named it the Columbian Exchange: the movement of plants, animals, and diseases between the Eastern and Western hemispheres following European contact with the Americas.

The exchange was catastrophically asymmetric in one direction and transformatively asymmetric in the other. What the Americas sent to the Old World — maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cacao, tobacco, rubber, chili peppers, sweet potatoes, peanuts, and squash, among dozens of other crops — has fed billions of people across Africa, Asia, and Europe who have never known a world without these plants and therefore do not register what they are eating as American. The Irish potato famine of 1845 is a catastrophe built on a dependency that was itself only three centuries old. The Italian love of the tomato is an attachment to a plant that no Italian had ever seen before 1500. The spicy cuisines of India, Thailand, Korea, and Sichuan are built on the chili pepper, which is indigenous to the Americas and arrived in Asia only in the sixteenth century.

What the Old World sent in the other direction was death on a scale that has no parallel in human history. The indigenous populations of the Americas had no acquired immunity to smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, and the other epidemic diseases that European contact introduced. The resulting demographic collapse was staggering. Estimates vary, but scholars generally agree that the indigenous population of the Americas declined by somewhere between fifty and ninety percent in the century after 1492.

Entire civilizations — the Aztec empire with its capital Tenochtitlan, home to perhaps 200,000 people in 1500, making it one of the largest cities in the world; the Inca empire stretching four thousand kilometers along the Andes; the complex confederacies of the North American interior — were hollowed out by disease before many of their peoples had seen a European face. Hernán Cortés arrived at Tenochtitlan in 1519 and found a city larger than any in Spain. By 1521, the city had fallen, and the smallpox epidemic that preceded the Spanish assault had already killed perhaps half its population.

The demographic collapse of the Americas had a consequence that connected the Atlantic world in a different and terrible way. The destruction of indigenous labor populations created a demand for labor that European colonizers filled by turning to Africa. The transatlantic slave trade, which historians David Eltis and David Richardson have documented as encompassing approximately 12.5 million enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic between roughly 1500 and 1900, was in a direct historical sense a consequence of the biological catastrophe of 1492.

Here is the thread, then, pulled taut: an American plant, transported to Europe, and from there to the fields of India and the American South; cotton picked by enslaved Africans whose ancestors were kidnapped to replace indigenous Americans killed by Old World disease; spun in English factories whose profits funded the capital formation that modernized the Western world; shipped on vessels navigated by instruments descended from Chinese astronomy and Islamic mathematics; purchased in transactions cleared through financial systems whose institutional design traces directly to debates begun in Enlightenment Europe about the nature of money, credit, and sovereign debt. This is the actual structure of the world we inherited.

The Industrial Revolution is usually told as a British story, and in its initial phase it was. But the preconditions for British industrialization were global, and its consequences were global in ways that remade the entire world within a century. Adam Smith, writing in 1776, identified the 'discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope' as 'the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind,' specifically because of the trading systems they established.

The historian Kenneth Pomeranz, in his landmark work on the divergence between European and Chinese economic development, has argued that what separated Britain from China in the crucial century between 1750 and 1850 was, in significant part, geography — Britain's coal deposits lay close to its manufacturing centers — and the fact that Britain had access to the land and labor of the Americas in ways that relieved the ecological constraints that constrained Chinese expansion.

The Sven Beckert's concept of 'war capitalism' — the plantation economies of the Atlantic world, organized around coerced labor and backed by European state violence — was its foundation. The cotton that fed the mills of Manchester and Birmingham came overwhelmingly from the American South, where it was grown by enslaved labor on land cleared from people whose displacement was managed by the military power of the American state. The capital accumulated in the slave trade and the plantation economy was invested in the infrastructure of British industrialization. Eric Williams made this argument in 1944, and historians have been debating and refining it ever since; but the basic claim — that the Atlantic slave system and British industrialization were structurally linked — has not been successfully refuted.

The Industrial Revolution, once established, became an engine of a new kind of globalization — more intensive, more capital-driven, and more asymmetric than anything that had preceded it. Britain in the mid-nineteenth century produced roughly half of the world's iron and cotton cloth and more than half of its steel.

India, which in 1750 had manufactured textiles whose quality no English mill could match and which had produced perhaps twenty-five percent of global GDP, was deindustrialized over the course of the nineteenth century by a combination of British trade policy, the imposition of free trade on a subordinate empire, and the technological advantages of machine production. The economist Ha-Joon Chang has documented how the same Britain that was preaching free trade to the world in the nineteenth century had itself developed behind high tariff walls, and that the free trade ideology it exported was, in practice, a policy that served the interests of the already-industrialized.

The result, described with devastating clarity by Mike Davis in his study of the late Victorian famines, was the creation of what we now call the developing world: economies integrated into a global system on terms that extracted their raw materials and labor while preventing the capital accumulation and industrial development that had made European wealth. The famines that killed between thirty and sixty million people in India, China, Brazil, and Africa in the late nineteenth century were not simply natural disasters.

John Maynard Keynes, writing in 1919 about the world destroyed by the First World War, described the pre-war era of globalization with a kind of mourning that reads today as almost impossibly naive: '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.' This was, he recognized, a world that had been destroyed, perhaps permanently.

Keynes was describing the first great wave of modern globalization, which had been driven by the steamship, the telegraph, the gold standard, and the political dominance of the British Empire. Between roughly 1870 and 1914, trade as a share of global GDP reached levels that would not be seen again until the 1980s. Capital moved across borders freely. Millions of migrants moved from Europe to the Americas and from Asia to the plantation economies of Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and East Africa.

The First World War shattered this system. It was followed, after a brief attempted restoration, by the Great Depression, which Harold James has described as 'the end of globalization' — a moment when the interconnectedness of the world economy became a transmission mechanism for catastrophe, as financial panics, trade collapses, and competitive devaluations spread from country to country faster than any government could respond. World trade fell by roughly sixty percent between 1929 and 1933. The institutions designed to manage the gold-standard system proved inadequate to the deflationary pressures unleashed by the financial crisis, and governments responded by retreating into nationalism, protectionism, and, in several important cases, fascism.

Eric Hobsbawm called the period from 1914 to 1945 the 'Age of Catastrophe,' and the phrase earns its burden. The Bretton Woods conference of 1944 created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, institutions designed to prevent the beggar-thy-neighbor dynamics of the 1930s from recurring. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, negotiated in 1947, began the long process of reducing the tariff barriers that had choked world trade in the interwar years.

The postwar economic order was, in retrospect, a remarkable achievement: the fastest sustained period of economic growth in human history, concentrated primarily in Western Europe, North America, and Japan, but with significant development in parts of East Asia and Latin America as well. It was also an order built on specific choices — about exchange rates, about the role of the state, about the permissibility of capital controls and industrial policy — that were not the only choices available and that, when the order changed in the 1970s and 1980s, would have consequences no one had fully anticipated.

The globalization of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is different from what came before in degree rather than kind — faster, denser, more technologically mediated, more financially integrated — but the continuities with earlier periods are more significant than the popular discourse of novelty usually allows. The container ship is its apotheosis. The internet accelerated flows that had been moving through telegraph cables since the 1850s. The offshoring of manufacturing from rich to poor countries was not invented in 1990; it is structurally continuous with the relationship between British factories and Indian cotton fields in 1850, except that the current version does not, at least formally, require an empire to enforce it.

What the current wave of globalization has done is to make visible, to anyone willing to look, the degree to which national economies are fictions: useful administrative categories that do not correspond to the actual organization of production, consumption, or exchange. Apple designs products in California, manufactures them in China using components produced in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and Germany, sells them globally, and books its profits in Ireland. This is the normal operating procedure of the contemporary multinational corporation, and the tax, labor, and regulatory arbitrage it enables is the system.

The economist Dani Rodrik has described what he calls the 'globalization trilemma': the impossibility of simultaneously maintaining hyperglobalization, national sovereignty, and democratic governance. You can have two of the three, but not all three at once. The first great wave of globalization, under the gold standard, had hyperglobalization and national sovereignty but sacrificed democracy — the political pressures of maintaining the gold standard in the face of unemployment and immiseration were eventually unmanageable in societies where workers had the vote. The postwar order chose national sovereignty and democratic governance, and accepted more limited globalization in the form of trade liberalization without full capital mobility. The system that emerged from the 1980s chose hyperglobalization and national sovereignty, and has been straining democratic institutions — in Europe, in the United States, in Brazil, in India, in Hungary, in the Philippines — ever since.

The contemporary backlash against globalization is, in this light, not irrational. The workers in the Midwestern United States whose factories closed in the 1990s and 2000s as production moved to lower-wage countries; the farmers in Mexico whose livelihoods were destroyed by subsidized American corn following NAFTA; the textile workers in Bangladesh who earn wages that allow them to participate in the global economy only as its most exploited participants — these are not people who misunderstood globalization.

The lesson of the history traced in these pages is that integration always has costs as well as benefits, and that the costs and benefits are not distributed equally. The merchants who organized the medieval Silk Road routes prospered. The communities who contracted plague along those routes paid with their lives. The planters of colonial America grew wealthy on cotton and sugar. The enslaved people who grew those crops paid a price that has not yet finished being paid. The weavers of Bengal, whose industry was destroyed by machine-made cloth, and the peasants of India, whose grain was exported during famines, subsidized that civilization without consenting to do so.

There is a gesture I have begun to make involuntarily when I handle any ordinary object. I turn it over, look for the label, and try to trace where it came from. The full chain: the material, the growing condition, the hands, the ships, the financial transactions, the historical processes that made it possible for this particular object to be here, in my hand, at this particular moment. I never get very far. The chain is too long and too tangled, and at some point it disappears into the past where the documentary record runs thin and the connections become speculative. But the gesture itself, the attempt, is what I am arguing for.

History is the story of connection itself: the movements and exchanges and collisions and contaminations that have made the world we inhabit. The cotton thread in the shirt on your back passed through the hands of people on four continents across five centuries before it reached you. Every one of those hands is part of your history, whether you have been taught their names or not. The web is beneath everything. We live in it, as we have always lived in it, unable to see it whole, capable only of pulling one thread at a time and watching, with something of wonder and vertigo, how much of the world comes with it.