When was the modern era born? This is a question historians continue to debate. There are indeed many possible starting points depending on what one considers a critical breaking moment in human history. The earliest date that I have ever seen ascribed is 1215 and the signing of the Magna Carta in England. Magna Carta is arguably the most significant early influence on the historical processes that led to the rule of constitutional law and the formation of universal political rights. Other historians will point more broadly to a series of events that began with the Black Death of 1348-1350 that transformed labour relations in Europe leading to revitalization of trade which led in turn led to a general flourishing of culture so much so that we called this period of history the Renaissance. Problem is that is still a very Euro-centric approach to the question.
Many historians, but not all, seem , however, to have settled on the year 1500. It’s a nice round number to begin with and it covers the Age of Discovery and the realization that the world was much larger than first suspected. In the century that followed, the modern nation-state rises and the institutions associated with large polities begin to develop. While this date is certainly a critical one and one of the fundamental epochs in human history because it reunited the two branches of humanity largely to benefit of one and the detriment of the another and because it marked the Columbian Exchange that would bring a widespread trade of plants, animals, foods, diet, human populations (including slaves), communicable diseases, and ideas between the Eastern and Western hemispheres. It’s hard to argue against the Columbian Exchange as the seminal event in human history because without question its impact was truly global affecting the vast majority of humanity. Still the Columbian Exchange did not affect a totality of humanity. (more…)
Globalization is not an easy term to define. Globalization is a word that has several connotations today. But broadly speaking, it is a process which began around the late 1970s, by the shift in world economy from an international to a more global one. In the international economy, individuals and firms from different countries traded goods and services across national boundaries, and the trade was closely regulated by nation-states. In the global economy, goods and services are produced and marketed by an oligopolistic web of global corporate networks whose operations, although spanning several national boundaries, are only loosely regulated by nation-states. It is also a process made possible by cheap energy.
In a profound sense, I am a product of globalization and it’s hard to knock something that created you. But I have never been indifferent to the rather mixed results that globalization has wrought in socio-economic terms. When it comes to globalization, I am more a critic than a fan but I do have feet in both camps (okay more like just a toe in the fan camp). But this post isn’t really about that subject because frankly that aspect of globalization might take a year or more to write. This post considers if we have reached the end of globalization as political force as the world economy tumbles.
One of the dramatic developments this weekend was the failure of Nicholas Sarkozy to get the European Union to act in concert over the spreading financial contagion in European capital and credit markets. By Monday, it was clear that member states would act in their own self-interest as Germany, the largest economy in the Eurozone, acted to save its banking system unilaterally. This is not without historical precedent. One of the lessons of the Great Crash of 1929 was that in the midst of that great economic crisis, countries generally retreated from the world economy enacting all sorts of trade barriers that ultimately prolonged the Great Depression. Lessons were learned and a system after the Second World War was put in place to ensure global dialogue and cooperation in times of economic crisis. The Breton Woods agreement, the World Bank, the IMF, the OECD, the European Union and GATT-WTO (from the Cancun to the Uruguay to the Doha rounds) are all part of this system. And this system is certainly under duress. Mention the term WTO in a leftist circle and watch the epithets flow. American conservatives aren’t too fond of the WTO either seeing everything as some conspiracy towards world government. The more sane among us, of course, can point to pluses and minuses. Economics is, after all, about trade-offs.
My own view is that globalization is ultimately tied to energy. If we can’t solve our energy crisis then it is likely not going to be a model going forward simply because it can’t. To move what we what we move across the global simply requires cheap energy. And corporations who have fashioned a global supply chain are likely to reconsider that move as energy costs surpass labour costs. I don’t think we have reached that point and I’m not sure we will in my lifetime but I am pretty sure that the peak oil phemonenon will lead to a new economic paradigm, one more based on regionalism than on globalism, a continental shift if you will. And it’s quite possible that the profound economic changes as yet unleashed will recreate the political map of the world. Paul Saffo, a Professor at Stanford and a futurist, for example argues that there is a one in two chance in that by 2050 the United States will no longer exist as a unified political entity having broken up to supra-regional city-states.
Today Carl Mortished in the Times of London too reflects on why globalisation will yield to regional fiefdoms. That article is below the fold and well worth reading. (more…)
Today marks the sesquicentennial of the first public debate on the topic of evolution at the Linnean Society of London. It was an event planned in haste and set off by a letter received by Charles Darwin on 18 June 1858. The letter came from Ambon in the Ternate, a group of islands known as the Moluccas, between Sulawesi and Papua New Guinea. Writing to Darwin was a young English ornithologist named Alfred Russel Wallace who had been collecting specimens throughout the Malay Archipelago. Wallace would collect over 125,000 different specimens, over 80,000 of them beetles alone. Over a thousand of them were new to science. More importantly, Wallace noticed a distinction between the fauna of islands closer to the Asian mainland and those closer to Australia, the zoogeographical boundary now known as the Wallace line.
Recovering from a bout with malaria in 1858, Wallace took the time to write to Darwin about his observations.
The problem then was not only how and why do species change, but how and why do they change into new and well defined species, distinguished from each other in so many ways; why and how they become so exactly adapted to distinct modes of life; and why do all the intermediate grades die out (as geology shows they have died out) and leave only clearly defined and well marked species, genera, and higher groups of animals?
Darwin read Wallace’s maunscript with alarm for he had sat on his ideas (he had discussed them with others but had never set them to paper) on natural selection since his return on the Beagle in 1841. It is thus in the fortnight between 18 June and 1 July, 1858 that Darwin wrote a quick paper that together with the Wallace manuscript were presented to the Linnean Society of London.
For the next year and half, Darwin would write feverishly and in November 1859, The Origen of Species would be published. It is, without a doubt, the greatest book ever written.
We entered the Age of Oil in 1859 and now on the eve of that sesquicentennial, it is clear that the Age of Oil approaches its end within the course of another human lifetime but thankfully not mine. I wouldn’t want to be around for the end of the Age of Oil. It’s going to be a bloody mess. There is no subsitute for oil. Parts of it can be replaced by sources of energy and parts of it cannot be replaced by any known substance. But even if we could replace oil with another magic elixir, it is likely that we can not replace it in sufficient quantities nor as inexpensively to propel humanity to the lifestyle to which it has been accustomed.
We take so much for granted. We believe it our birthright to hop in a motor vehicle and have it deliver us to our destination of choice at speeds of up to 75 miles an hour. What’s more we can we traverse the planet in comfortable (well at least on international flights these days, domestic not so much) jetliners that take us from continent to continent in hours. In short, oil conquered the tyranny of distance for humanity, well at least for the better part of what now looks to be a century-long human enterprise in human prosperity, hedonism, excess and waste that wasn’t even shared by all though it certainly made all our numbers possible. Oil changed everything, it made us what we are today. This is the Age of Oil.
Note: This story, while perhaps amusing, has serious consequences because what underpins the revival of guano is related to the demise of oil.
I wrote a paper back in college on the Peruvian guano trade of the 1840s and the 1850s and I never thought I’d write another piece on guano ever again, but here I am writing on guano. The guano trade was responsible for the first real agrarian revolution where crop productivity increased dramatically. It allowed European farmers to feed a growing European population in the mid nineteenth century.
Guano is accumulated bird dung and it is found on bird islands and coasts around the world that also happen to be dry. In a wet enviroment, the excrement of birds simply runs off and gets washed away or it just gets absorbed into the detrius. As the bird extrement accumulates and dries, it becomes a dense organic material that is very rich in nitrate and phosphate. Around the world, guano deposits are usually found on dry oceanic islands lying in the middle of oceanic upwelling regions that support very rich fisheries. Living off the fish, and concentrated in great numbers by the small areas of available nesting sites, literally millions of seabirds, each excreting about 20 grams of dung a day, can generate massive amounts of guano.
As an organic fertilizer, guano has no substitute. It packs a punch in terms of density and fertility. The trade came to dominated by the British and led to a commercial boom in Peru. It also eventually led in 1879 to the War of the Pacific between Peru and Bolivia versus Chile. As a result of this war, Bolivia lost its outlet to the sea. While there are numerous islands that are guano islands (Nauru, Howland, Palmyra Atoll), no where else is there a greater concentration of guano and so readily accessible as in the coastal islands and desert coasts of Peru.
