Hi, I’m Emily Graslie and this is Crash
Course Big History, and today we’re talking
about globalization - a process that goes
back hundreds of years, and deeply impacted
the collective learning of humanity.
As we’ve discussed in previous episodes,
collective learning is the process that has
raised the complexity of human societies for
all 250,000 years of our history.
It’s the accumulation of more innovation
with each generation than is lost by the next.
It allowed us to get better at foraging, spread
out across the world and adapt to the harshest
of environments.
It gave birth to agriculture, industry, and
every other revolutionary technology.
But collective learning has its vital ingredients
with the number of potential innovators and
the connectivity of information flows between
them.
Globalization, in its broadest possible sense,
brought the previously separate world zones
of Afro-Eurasia, the Americas, Australasia,
and the Pacific Island Societies together,
with both positive andv negative impacts.
Today we’ll look at how three things were
shaped in the earliest waves of globalization
and how they revolutionised our pool of collective
learning, for better or for worse: printing,
potatoes, and plagues.
Previously in Crash Course Big History, we
looked at how humans spread out of Africa
64,000 years ago.
We expanded across Asia over the next 20,000
years and even accomplished the astounding
feat of settling Australia.
We entered Europe and Siberia 40,000 to 25,000
years ago, and hunted animals across the Bering
Strait and down into North and South America.
These migrations weren’t so rapid in human
terms- they took thousands and thousands of
years.
Even though humans inhabited almost every
region of the globe, we didn’t maintain
regular contacts between the major world zones.
The Americas were isolated in many ways, and
for over 10,000 years, they developed and
diversified into lots of different cultures,
eventually giving rise to agrarian states
in Mesoamerica.
Before Columbus, before the Vikings, and,
as some historians assert, before the Chinese
sailed off the coasts of America, there were
thousands of years where the collective learning
of the Americas was done entirely by the Americas.
And we see surprisingly similar results in
the rest of the world.
The origin of agriculture, the beginning of
states and empires, and the development of
monumental architecture including pyramid
building happened independently.
In Australasia and the Pacific, environments
were largely rich enough in resources for
populations to thrive without agriculture.
For instance, in Australia, humans engaged
in a practice called “fire-stick farming”
which isn’t the plant and animal domestication
we usually refer to as agriculture.
Instead it was foraging through the use of
setting large forest fires that would clear
new pathways through the brush, kill and cook
a large amount of game, and take advantage
of the round of rejuvenation that naturally
follows a forest fire.
Early agriculture usually leads to a decline
in the living standards of the foragers who
adopt it, in terms of malnutrition, back-breaking
labour, and the resulting diseases and famines.
Humans only give up foraging when they are
trapped by a lack of new ecosystems or by
population pressure.
Or both.
Australasia only developed agriculture in
Papua New Guinea.
The largest world zone, Afro-Eurasia, had
a lot of advantages from the start in many
ways.
We group Africa, Europe, and Asia into one
world zone because there was transference
of collective learning - even if it was halting
and rarely traversed long distances.
For instance, the silk roads enabled trade
right from China to the West of Africa and
to Europe for thousands of years.
Most individual traders didn’t travel the
entire silk road, but piece by piece and trader
by trader, goods and information would travel
the entire route.
It wasn’t exactly a brimming information
super-highway but it was something!
In the past 10,000 years, agriculture independently
arose in Afro-Eurasia several times: in the
Fertile Crescent, in East Asia, and in West
Africa.
Agricultural surplus gave rise to agrarian
states, which then slowly grew in size.
So, now we’ve reached the first wave of
globalization.
Starting with the sustained colonization of
the Americas over 500 years ago, continuing
with the colonization of Australasia and the
Pacific 200 to 300 years ago, humanity once
again united into a single global system.
This had a profound effect on the pace of
collective learning.
Unsurprisingly, the modern revolution soon
followed.
Like globalization today, the impacts took
many forms.
Some of them were positive and some of them
catastrophically negative and that brings
us to those three P’s, printing, potatoes,
and plagues.
Firstly, printing.
While humanity has had collective learning
for 250,000 years, orally passing along knowledge
from generation to generation, I think we
can agree it’s a major step forward to write
something down.
Sort of like a giant post it note for humanity,
we can capture things in text to remind ourselves
of something in case we ever forget.
Writing also allowed for the communication
of more complex and sometimes abstract ideas.
Even with writing, the greatest limitation
on collective learning is the circulation
of written works.
Most information was still passed on orally.
Literacy was relatively rare until the modern
era.
The books that were produced had to be copied
out by hand which was a process that took
a long time and could include numerous mistakes,
and it made books so expensive that they were
essentially luxury goods.
Printing first emerged in China around 200
BCE.
Blocks of wood were carved with the imprint
the printer wanted to make on the page.
It did mean, however, that each page had to
be skillfully carved, which ate up a lot of
time when trying to compile a full book.
Every page had a unique woodblock.
Around 1050 CE, the Chinese invented movable
type, where different characters on clay tablets
could be rearranged to create a new imprint.
But the thousands of unique characters made
the process impractical for most printers.
And until the 20th century, printing in China
was still dominated by the woodblock.
In the 1200s, the Koreans developed their
own metal moveable type which was more efficient
than clay tablets.
There was no printing press of any kind, but
instead the paper was pressed onto the inked
type with a wooden spatula.
These methods allowed East Asia to circulate
way more copies of books than ever before,
at a rate that was much more efficient than
manuscripts copied by hand.
In the meantime, paper and printing filtered
down the silk roads into the Arab world and
by 900 CE, book production had advanced dramatically.
The Middle East mostly had hand-written books,
but printing undeniably played a role, copying
and disseminating knowledge wider and faster,
even in its woodblock form.
The Middle East widely used woodblock techniques
to stamp amulets and playing cards.
This stamping practice eventually reached
Europe via the Crusades.
In Europe, printing became more rapid thanks
to the combination of stamping an imprint
on a page via moveable type and a press inspired
by the wine press.
This had a profound impact on collective learning.
When Gutenberg developed the printing press
around 1450, the largest library in Europe
was in the Vatican, and it was around 2000
books.
A few centuries later in the 1800s a well-to-do
middle class lawyer could easily compile a
similarly sized collection.
Book printing went into overdrive.
In just the short span of 50 years, between
1450 and 1500, there were more books printed
in Europe than had been hand-copied in the
past 600 years.
Printing presses grew more and more efficient.
By the 19th century when roller presses got
involved, book production was quick and cheap.
Written knowledge became available to more
people.
This fueled the scientific revolution, allowed
for rapid exchange of extremely complex ideas,
and greatly enhanced the connectivity of information
between millions and millions of potential
innovators.
OK, onto the potato.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
The potato, humble hero of collective learning,
is a root vegetable first domesticated in
Mesoamerica when farming was first getting
started.
It has many important advantages for agrarian
societies that literally live and die by the
harvest.
(1) Potatoes can grow in all sorts of climates
and environments.
(2) They enrich the soil rather than completely
draining its nutrients.
They’re a cheap source of energy for humans,
and unlike wheat, don’t take as much work
to prepare.
In fact, the potato gained the nickname, “ready-made
bread” for its miraculous properties in
a world before TV dinners.
Potatoes fostered and fed the agrarian societies
of Peru and Bolivia for thousands of years.
In these environments it wasn’t possible
to grow that other American crop – maize.
But I’ll stick to one side of the grocery
aisle for now.
The potato was established in Europe in the
1500s, due to Spanish and other European sailors
packing them to eat on their trips back from
the Americas.
Its yields played a big role in the agricultural
revolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, which was a vital pre-cursor for
the industrial revolution.
What is less well known is how the potato
was also introduced into East Asia in the
1600s, where it was gradually adopted along
with other American crops like yams and maize,
and helped to raise the carrying capacity
of the growing population.
Some historians assert that the introduction
of the potato helped delay some of the worst
famines in Asia by a century.
And the potato raising the carrying capacity
of East Asia brings us back to collective
learning.
Printing may have enhanced connectivity, but
the potato led to a clear increase in the
number of potential innovators.
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
But when talking about the history of potatoes
it’s important to mention the Irish Potato
Famine, where reliance on mostly one vulnerable
kind of potato and government inaction led
to the starvation or migration of millions
of people.
Or its introduction into Africa where for
generations it was viewed as a symbol of colonial
oppression.
These are definitely negative impacts of early
globalization
And on that cheerful note, let’s go onto
the last of our three P’s, which is definitely
the least fun.
Plagues.
Afro-Eurasia, with its teeming populations
and domestication of animals again had the
lead - this time, in disease.
It’s thought that the plague of Justinian
in the 6th century CE and the Black Death
in the 14th century CE both arose out of the
agrarian lifestyles of humans.
And with higher population densities, these
diseases can spread rapidly.
It didn’t help that Afro-Eurasia was united
by the silk roads which carried the Black
Death across long distances.
Starting in 14th century East Asia, it killed
an estimated 25 million people.
It then may have been spread by Mongol armies
across the super-continent, where most famously
the Mongols besieging the Crimean city of
Kaffa reportedly flung plague-ridden corpses
over the city walls.
Somehow plague eventually got picked up by
traders from Europe, where it killed one third
to one half of the population.
While Afro-Eurasia’s large populations may
have been great in terms of potential innovators,
it also produced a greater number of deadly
diseases.
And when those diseases were introduced to
the Americas, where people had not built up
resistances over previous generations, the
results were horrific.
Measles, smallpox, and other illnesses struck
the Americas, for which they had no natural
immunity.
And the diseases spread with such lightning
speed that illness sometimes swept through
American populations faster than Europeans
moved inland.
We can’t understate this catastrophe.
While it is difficult to know for sure what
the pre-Columbian population of the Americas
was, the mid-range estimate is that these
diseases killed about 50 million people within
a hundred years.
This tragedy had a clear impact on collective
learning.
The tremendous loss of human life wiped out
a massive number of potential innovators for
several generations.
The loss of population that came with the
Columbian Exchange devastated the cultures
of America, and crippled their ability to
contribute to humanity as a whole.
As a result, European ideas came to dominate
in the Americas.
This homogenisation of culture is a familiar
aspect of globalization, and it doesn’t
always benefit the pace of collective learning.
The loss of 50 million people is an overwhelming
tragedy not just for the Americas, but for
humanity as a whole, and its repercussions
continue to be felt today.
The process of early globalization, uniting
all the world zones, is not just important
for human history, it’s also a crucial moment
for the unifying theme of 13.8 billion years
of change.
The acceleration of collective learning by
linking together the globe into a vibrant
and rapidly expanding pool of knowledge was
vital to the continued transformation of complexity
in our Universe.
And globalization is a process that has not
stopped.
It’s intensifying, with all the positive
and negative impacts involved.
But with luck, and a lot of wisdom, hopefully
the continued story of globalization will
avoid the horrific human costs of the past
and continue to weave us together in a world
of 7 billion, increasingly well-informed and
interconnected innovators.
It is, after all, what will determine our
future, and the outcome of the cosmic tale
in our little corner of the Universe.
Thanks for watching.
