Globalization is when a business or other form of organization develop international or start operation on an international scale. Throughout this class we talked about many different forms and kinds of globalization. I was surprised at how many different kinds there actually are and how we experience globalization in our everyday lives. Globalization has been happening since very early on. It began in the late 1400’s when people started travelling and imposing their ideas and/or lifestyles on others around the globe. There is very many forms of globalization but the main ones are political globalization, social globalization, and economic globalization. These forms of globalization are expressed in many types of ways and have been around since very early on in time. In this essay I will elaborate on different examples of globalization.
Globalization had started before this, but, I think the true start to globalization was when Christopher Columbus set out on his voyage and found America.
After this happened trade across the Atlantic was very common and was not something that was happening before. Let’s start with the Columbian Exchange. Europeans and Africans brought their plants and animals over here. Such as, wheat, rice, sugarcane, grapes, and many garden fruits and vegetables, as well as weeds where they transformed the landscape and made possible a recognizably European diet and a European way of life. Though these new plants were revolutionary, their animals were even more revolutionary. They brought horses, pigs, cattle, goats, sheep. All of these animals were new to the Americans and flourished greatly in the new environment that was mostly free of natural predators. These animals made ranching economies and cowboy cultures possible for people in the North and the South.
Horses also had a really big impact on Native societies. Specifically, natives in the North. They abandoned their farming lifestyles to go hunting bison on horseback. Through this happening, women lost their role as being the food producers and was replaced by the culture of men being hunters and warriors.
In the other direction of the exchange, American food crops such as potatoes, corn, and cassava spread rapidly and widely throughout the Eastern Hemisphere. In Europe, calories were mainly derived from corn and potatoes and this helped push the population from 60 million to a whopping 390 million. These crops also later created a cheap and mildly nutritious food source for millions of industrial workers. Potatoes also allowed the Irish population to flourish and then caused them to crash when they had a potato famine.
Meanwhile in China the popular crops were peanuts, corn, and sweet potatoes. They ate these alongside their rice and wheat and it was used to sustain a good amount of their exploding population. By the early twentieth century, American crops made up about 20 percent of total Chinese food production. In African corn was a popular one and it was an easy source of food for the cargoes of the transatlantic trade. Enough about the food.
Other American crops such as tobacco and chocolate were soon used all around the world as well. There was even manuals on how to smoke tobacco and Chinese people liked it a lot. A Chinese poet said that tobacco was the gentleman’s companion, and that it warms his heart and makes his mouth feel like a divine furnace. Tea from China and coffee from the Islamic world also spread quite globally as you would guess since we still drink both today. The societies that developed within the American colonies drove the processes of globalization and completely reshaped the world economy of the new modern era. The Atlantic slave trade brought the African peoples over here resulting in them scattering throughout the Western Hemisphere. This enormous network of communication, migration, trade, disease, plants, and animals is what the Columbian Exchange is.
Now onto the Silk Road. The Silk Road was an old trade course that went all the way from China to Europe. It went across the North borders of China, Persia, and India and ended in Europe near the Mediterranean Sea and what we now know as Turkey.
