We146;re All Global Wanderers

Chanda writes exceedingly well and one expects no less from a journalist and editor. This book is about globalisation. However, there are other people too who write well and have books on globalisation: Thomas Friedman, Joseph Stiglitz, Jagdish Bhagwati, the list goes on. What distinguishes this book from others is the sweep. Too often, globalisation is identified with economic globalisation alone and equated with liberalisation/privatisation and protests at WTO meetings or Davos.

But globalisation has been going on for thousands of years, since the beginning of human civilisation. What distinguishes the present phase from the earlier ones is velocity, volume number of consumers who are integrated, variety diversity of products and visibility. These four V8217;s are the author8217;s list and can one perhaps add that governments have become partly thanks to technology relatively powerless to regulate or control globalisation.

Chanda8217;s book is about the thousands of years that preceded the present phase 8212; it is about Europeans learning to play violins with bowstring made of Mongolian horsehair; origins of words like algebra, algorithm, zero and dollar; it is about traders, preachers, adventurers and warriors carrying these forces of integration throughout the world ever since anatomically modern humans migrated from Africa 50,000 years ago.

This tapestry is sketched out across 10 chapters, the first depicting the launch of globalisation from out of Africa. The second traces the web of commerce, from camel commerce to e-commerce. Did you know that in 1st century BCE, an Indian king sent a trade mission to Rome and on the agenda was the thorny issue of fake Italian wine being exported to India? In the third chapter, we have case studies of three products 8212; cotton, coffee and microchips 8212; and their evolution and spread consequent to globalisation. Thus far, the book has been about traders. In the fourth chapter, one moves to preachers, in particular of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, and the role of these religious missionaries. NGOs are also thrown into this chapter, as modern-day missionaries who may be secular, but are missionaries nonetheless. The motives of preachers are different from those of adventurers and there are several of them 8212; the Carthaginian Hanno, Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo, Ferdinand Magellan. Their travels and travails are the subject matter of the fifth chapter. In the sixth chapter, we turn to warriors and the imperialist ambitions of Rome and Britain, of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan.

In a way, these six chapters conclude the first part of the book, the subtitle having been adequately addressed. This is the part that is also the most interesting. In the seventh chapter, the author turns to the soft underbelly of globalisation, the slave trade and the spread of viruses even the computer kind. Chapters 8, 9 and 10 are clicheacute;d in content, since they cover terrain one encounters in more contemporary accounts of globalisation, weighing pluses and minuses, trading off contents with discontents. These three chapters are like an epilogue to the book and there is indeed nothing to say beyond the hackneyed and the clicheacute;d, since the integration over thousands of years has already been sketched out. Perhaps all this stuff could have been consolidated into a single chapter, thus ensuring the book didn8217;t lose is focus. One other minor complaint 8212; there are occasions where the source of information isn8217;t properly referenced. This makes it difficult if one wishes to undertake future research.

But these minor complaints apart, this is a great book, especially the first seven chapters. Reading it is like undertaking a journey oneself.