Peter Stearns is perhaps the most prolific of all contemporary world historians (though Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is breathing down his neck as I write). His sheer output is astonishing. Equally astonishing is the fact that the quality of his writing does not seem to suffer as a result. He has now produced a large number of books that take up particular themes as they play out in world history. Recent subjects he has tackled include consumerism, tourism and travel, sexuality, childhood, and industrialization. If you want a brief, well-informed, intelligent survey of how these subjects have been handled by world historians, together with thorough discussion of the pros and cons of different approaches to them, you could do no better than start with Peter Stearns’ books on the subject.

Globalization is a new term for an old process. The word began to be widely used only in the last decade of the twentieth century, mainly by sociologists, to describe the rapidly intensifying networks of connections between different regions at that time. That you could eat a McDonald’s hamburger in Beijing that was more or less identical to the one you might find in Johannesburg or Moscow; that you could move money instantaneously around the world – these were the types of issue that globalization theorists discussed. And by and large they argued that these were new phenomena.

It did not take world historians long to point out that, in their general form, if not in their intensity, such processes are ancient. In The rise of the West, first published in 1963, William McNeill had already argued that ‘the principal factor promoting historically significant social change is contact with strangers possessing new and unfamiliar skills’.Footnote ⁶ In a later work, written with John McNeill, he argued that the ‘human web’ of interconnections was a defining feature of the history of our species.Footnote ⁷ In other words, increasing contacts between different human communities have been perhaps the most important of all drivers of historical change throughout human history. This is an idea that, with many variations, has proved extremely congenial to world historians. So it is no surprise that Stearns, too, offers a ‘deep’ interpretation of globalization.

How deep? ‘No one’, he argues, ‘has yet clearly argued for globalization before 1000’, though he concedes that there have been ‘diffuse gestures in this direction’ (p. 5). Instead, he opts for the year 1000 CE as the first plausible date for the beginnings of globalization, borrowing an idea proposed by David Northrup: that world history as a whole can plausibly be divided into two periods – a long period of diversification and a much briefer period of convergence, beginning in about 1000 CE. However the forces of convergence had already been prefigured in developments in the preceding millennium, such as the emergence of the Silk Roads. But before 1000 CE, Stearns contends, the key processes occurred within different regions – a good justification, perhaps, for the well-established tradition of treating the history of the ancient world civilization by civilization. Even where they existed, inter-regional contacts had little impact.

From 1000, Stearns considers four possible inflection points in the prehistory and history of globalization: 1000 CE, 1500 CE, 1850 CE, and the second half of the twentieth century. He argues that from 1000 CE we can see the forces that made further convergence seem inevitable. True globalization, a world in which all regions were linked together, would not begin until after 1500. However, many changes within Afro-Eurasia pointed to the growing importance and momentum of interregional trade and travel between 1000 and 1500 CE. Perhaps most important was the growth in scale and intensity of exchanges throughout the Indian Ocean and along the ancient Silk Roads, both regions dominated by Islam. Modest improvements in the technologies of transportation, and growing demand for international goods such as gold and spices, both enabled and stimulated international trade. But the spread throughout Eurasia of the Black Death was also a significant marker of increased interregional contacts.

Stearns describes the period beginning around 1500 as the birth of globalization, while noting that many other historians still regard the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as preludes to true globalization. In this period there appeared the first truly global networks of exchange, with the inclusion of the Americas and eventually of the Pacific and Australasia. We see the first global exchanges of crops and domestic animals, the first global trading companies, the first global transfers of diseases, and, for the first time, a global division of labour, particularly in the Atlantic region.

Some historians, including Osterhammel and Petersson, have argued that the mid eighteenth century marks the true birth of globalization, with the world’s first global wars and the beginnings of the first global (or nearly global) revolutions, including the Industrial Revolution. C. A. Bayly has argued that 1750 marks the end of an era of ‘archaic globalization’ that was dominated by the trade in luxury goods.

Stearns himself sees the mid nineteenth century as the critical divide between older and more modern forms of globalization. Only then were technologies of transportation and communication really revolutionized, with the appearance of international steam ships and sea-bed telegraph cables, and only then did the beginnings of an era of imperialism that transformed much of Afro-Eurasia emerge. He argues persuasively for a period of de-globalization in the first half of the twentieth century, followed by a period of the most intensive globalization yet known in the second half of the century. Dominating this new era were radical new technologies such as the internet and air travel.

Not just a valuable survey of the problem of globalization in world history, the book is also a useful survey and discussion of historical controversies over the different phases of globalization and their importance. It is also an admirably short book on a large topic.

It would have been interesting to explore, however briefly, the possibility that globalization has even deeper roots than Stearns acknowledges. After all, he is willing to acknowledge that well before 1000 CE there were powerful forces stitching together regional communities into regional civilizations, and that even in prehistory there were networks of exchange of goods and cultural artefacts extending across entire continents. What forces pushed communities into contact with each other even in those phases of human history when societies seemed most diverse and most separated? The persistence of these forces makes it tempting to think that globalization was powered, ultimately, by some very deep drivers indeed. Is it possible, as William McNeill has argued, that contacts between communities have always been among the most fundamental of the drivers of human history? If that is true, then we could reasonably argue that the roots of globalization should be traced back well before 1000 CE; that they grow, in fact, out of the very nature of our species, even if globalization itself is a phenomenon of the last 500 years. It is a tribute to this fine survey of the problem of globalization that it provokes such questions.