Nayan Chanda opens with the story of the first 150 people walking out of what today we call Africa some 60,000 years ago (following the findings of DNA research). The first agrarian communities were founded some 6,000, or in some cases maybe up to 10,000, years BCE, and concepts of territorial possessions were developed. What in older theories was the olive (or in China the mulberry) tree as reason for claiming a certain piece of land as private property, since planting an orchard would need enduring safety, for Chanda is the fig tree. Sedentary cultures developed, and ‘occupation of a particular territory came to be associated with a people ...’ (p. 25). That made migrations more purposeful and the possession of land changed its meaning. Chanda identifies four different kinds of people who have been continually connecting different centres–preachers of universalizing religions such as Buddha, adventurers such as Ibn Battuta, empire-builders such as Sargo of Akkad, and traders from the slave trades to contemporary trafficking.

The succeeding chapters offer examples of these types of early globalization. In ‘From camel-commerce to e-trade’, Chanda starts off by relating his buying of an Apple iPod, shipped from Shanghai to New Haven, Connecticut, in two days, and then contrasts that with camel caravans and shipping in antique times. The invention of using the monsoons in shipping, which shortened traffic from the Red Sea to India from thirty to three months, is explained. And the story is told of certain products such as cotton–domesticated in the Indus River valley about 2000 BCE and dispersed to the Mediterranean during the first millennium; Indian cotton-wear became an important item of international trade in Roman times. Chanda then gives a short story of King Cotton, from the English attempts to combine domination of the international trade with closing the national market in 1701 to the Multi-Fiber Arrangement of 1974 and the end of the quota system in 2005. That ‘promised lower prices for consumers ...’; each job saved for American labour by the quota system had cost the American tax payer $170,000 (p. 82).

The capacity to write short stories–of cotton or coffee, the Macedonian or American empires, Buddhist or Muslim missions–which draw on a lot of literature is one of the strengths of the book. Of course, a professional historian might add some critical notes. For instance, his data on the losses of life in the Middle Passage are too high, at least following H. S. Klein, and his numbers for slaves traded from Africa to the Muslim world are too low, at least following Bairoch. The northern and central-Asian parts of Battuta's journeys are left out, differing from the editor of his writings, Mackintosh-Smith, as are the northern Silk Roads as west–east ways for preachers such as Nestorians or Zaroastrians following the expansion of Islam in the eighth century or as east–west ways for Lamaist monks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But such notes are beside the point. It is fun reading the book, jumping from donkey-caravans to e-trade, and from an Assyrian merchant's wife complaining that the neighbour has a bigger house to the suicide of Lee Kyung-hae at the Cancún meeting of the WTO on 10 September 2003.

The main point of the book is a meta-critique of the critics of globalization, which is concentrated in the last seventy-five pages. Chanda argues against these critics, beginning with the WTO conference in Seattle in 1999. He maintains that globalization–though increasing the differences between the middle class and the really rich–helped to diminish the percentages of the poor in many societies: ‘since 1985, the share of the world's population living in poverty has declined’ (p. 303). He argues that European and Asian peasant opposition to ‘genetically modified organisms’ (GMOs) and the fight for ‘food sovereignity’ in certain countries is leading in the wrong direction, as international trade in food opens up possibilities for the poor: ‘The opening of the rice market would help not just giant American growers but also poorer and more efficient rice producers from Thailand and Vietnam’ (p. 284). Quite generally, the poor of the world are supporting worldwide market integration, because that offers them better possibilities to survive–Vietnam's hard fight to join the WTO being the best example (see pp. 287 f.). Globalization is acting in favour of the world's poor, though against the interests of the middle classes, who are losing income.

That is an important point, to my knowledge first made by the Russian sociologist Andrej Foursov in 1995. But Chanda's book does not belong to the political sciences and does not argue this issue systematically, for instance by discussing the findings of the World Development Reports. And, despite its title, this is not a book about history in the sense of the (western) profession, trying to explain changes in the course of time. Questions of periodization are handled in passing–for instance, by identifying the microchip as ‘the single most important factor that distinguishes today's globalization from the slowly growing interconnection and interdependence of the past’ (p. 103), but without using this definition as part of an attempt to qualify developments in time. History is described in the form of analogies–Richard Dicker, director of the Human Rights Watch International Justice Program and lobbying to protect the people of Darfur, and his colleagues ‘are the newest incarnations of missionaries’ (p. 107). The expression used here implies even more than analogy: it implies the Hindu concept of the transmigration of souls; but maybe this is just due to style. Chanda is a journalist and editor, and he is collecting arguments for his message. That message is clear enough–we have seen all this before.

Chanda presents the story of the critics of globalization from Attac to Stiglitz in the light of the rich and old tradition of global interconnections. Single historical narratives, mostly in the first part of the book, have the function of illustrating the main thesis–that globalization has been around for millennia, changed over time in a couple of ways and that there is no reason to jump to conclusions.

Which of course is true, but by itself does not explain very much. For instance it does not solve the question of protecting local/regional ‘young’ industries or trades in the twenty-first century, which England solved so successfully in the eighteenth century by prohibiting the import of Indian textiles. The book is well told, full of interesting details, and offers a short critical history of the anti-globalization movement, put into the setting of world history from the time some Cro-Magnon-people left Africa until the moment when others invented the Internet. It should be prescribed reading for all those who think they are still living in a world of nation-states or who even want to migrate back there in their minds.