Global Trading System

History

The Origins of Phase 4 and the Global Trade System

(Phase 4 refers to a historical phase starting 600 BCE)

Mark Whitaker:

"Where did phase 4 and this global trade system come from, in essence? This still-current imbalance began with the start of a wider global trade system from the 500s/600s with the expansion of Islam on the southwestern side of Eurasia (i.e., trading across the Middle East and North Africa, or "MENA"), equally linked to India, Central Asia, and the southern Indian Ocean to South East Asia. The global trade system of the 500/600s equally expanded with the consolidation of the Chinese T'ang Dynasty on the other eastern side of Eurasia. Thus, wider scales of trade started to be facilitated more regularly between these Islamic and Chinese trade zones and civilizations, particularly through Central Asia, India, and South East Asia.

So, first, the scale of global trade increases in this period through multiple civilizations, compared to more regionalized political economies with more shallow international trade before, regularly conducted just between the same regional powers. This first continued the same highly lucrative textiles, metal ingots, processed oils, salt, and jewels that have always been ideal long-distance commodities, because they fetch high prices per minimal land-based transport costs and minimal risk from transport damage. However, the scale of these commodities expands in this period with the opening of more secure wider territorial trading routes across Eurasia, as well as more secure international global oceanic shipping routes across the Indian Ocean.

Second, items of trade add another major category allowing the first mass market economies: drugs. Major drugs like tea and opium came first from China. Then came Islamic sugar plantations and coffee from Ethiopia. South East Asia sent a chewable betel nut. Upon these, much later came international European alcohols brought into trade, yet somewhat the elder regional drugs from Roman wine and German beer heritage. Mesopotamia had beer millennia ago, though not a global trade system that pulls these into mass production for export. Then came scaled British Empire and American tobacco, alongside South American cocaine, and originally Latin American marijuana. Next came many more European-synthetic drugs, and other culinary products spiked with drugs that were invented from the 1800s onward and shipped internationally. Therefore, drugs for over a millennium have been the only cross-cultural commodity with global mass markets that transcend regional cultural principles because of common physiological effects. Thus, drugs are innately a major circuit of capital holding together a growing truly global trading system at scale, legal or illegal, while they undermine regional cultural heritages with capital flight and cultural destabilization.

In time, the growing Islamic trading empire and the Chinese trading zone both were subsumed by the wider military consolidation across both areas by the Mongol Empire. This created an even larger and stable global trading system for the length and duration of this empire across Central Asia and into Mongol-linked/Yuan Dynasty China. For instance, the first two "commercial-only" cities of 1 million people (meaning, without dependence on being a subsidized political capital city) developed under the Yuan/Mongols: prosperous Hangzhou near the southern Yangzi River delta outlet, and prosperous Kaifeng on the south bank of the northern Yellow River. However, as the Mongol/Yuan dynasty fell apart, so did population and commercial scale of both Hangzhou and Kaifeng between 1250–1400 CE.

After ousting the Mongols, a Chinese restorationist Ming Dynasty increasingly was adamant that the past status quo in China—participating in a global trade system—should be ended to stop it from influencing its state and Confucian cultural restoration. Thus, Ming China ended the (Islamic-captained) Chinese treasure ships that traveled as far as East Africa in the early 1400s. Some kind of Chinese ships likely traveled worldwide: even wider to Canada, to Pacific coastal North America, as well as to coastal South America. (In total, there is evidence of Phoenician, Roman, African, Islamic, as well as Chinese diasporic influences in the Western Hemisphere—topics that Eurocentric scholars tied to their narrative of being globally first prefer to ignore.)

Chinese withdrawal from a global trade system left the baton of global trade to be passed more exclusively to European Christians and to the European subcultures of the deeply trans-state commercial populations of Jews, who came on the global scene by managing a few global states for others—from the first Mediterranean commercial city-states like Genoa and Venice, then to the Spanish Netherlands Empire, and then to the expansion of the British Empire from the late 1600s, and then French Empires from the 1800s onward. Europeans in general rounded off their other empires with other Swedish, Belgian, Italian, and German Empires. Such inter-competing European global states fought "at home" and fought overseas only to gain expanded extractions elsewhere to perpetuate themselves securely back at home in the heightened plural European conflicts of religion, trade, and territorial conquest at home and abroad that such global states encouraged.

The first to expand their military and commercial empires into colonies in North and South America durably were the Basque, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Scottish/British. This integrated the Western Hemisphere deeply into a global trade system for the first time. By the late 1800s, major European-centered global state empires consolidated themselves across all past territorial and oceanic trades already created by other global states in other areas. The once thin and spotty littoral colonies of Europe by the 1700s expanded into deep and wide territorial possessions by the late 1800s. This was aided by Europeans and Americans adding from the mid-1800s several fresh systemic infrastructures to their global states, like transport changes (railroads first) and then a series of fresh media regime changes of electrical communication like telegraphs, telephones, wireless radio, cinema, television, and the Internet. Still centered upon "trans-Atlantic" global states, all these ongoing infrastructural developments were applied at scale worldwide. Thus, global transportation and electrical communication networks stitched together their vast empires and their global trading systems into ever tighter and efficient interconnections for bulk commodity transshipment and the global acculturations that accrued from it. This further demoted any more localized and regionalized representative or sustainable response. These infrastructures let Europeans first have an easier and faster response against any peripheral rebellion or change, as well as have the first go at acculturating global people into their own mindset of soft power.

Typically before 1900, there were only 1 or 2 cities of 1 million people at a time throughout previous world history. By 1900, there were at least 10 major cities of 1 million or more at the same time—a world record. Novel cities of 1 million started to appear everywhere around 1900: Chicago, Moscow, St. Petersburg (from 1875), and the Austrian Empire's capital at Vienna (from 1875) maintained their scales over 1 million; plus, there was Shanghai (a group European empire capital city, in China, as Beijing had declined), and there was the Japanese capital at Edo (called Tokyo after the 1860s) that maintained its scales over 1 million from the early 1700s; to this, add London (6M), Paris (3M), New York City (4M), and Berlin (2M). These 10 cities were the only examples of cities over 1 million across the world in 1900. By the turn of the 21st century, there were over 400 cities of 1 million people by 2006.

The decline of many official European empires after World War II in 1945 through the 1970s led into (1) the (re)invention of approximately 100 fresh states in a post-colonial period, each potentially facing a global trade system and decisions for how to develop itself and to engage with a global trade system. Thus, the past formal European/American imperial arrangement started to shift into (2) more informal financial and corporate empires centered on the same global states, yet only their commercial infrastructures within a more multi-polar global trading system of multiple global states both in trade and in global military conflict.

Over time, the systemic balances shifted toward a global privatized consolidation around a homeless global technocracy over all globally powerful states and all globally weak states by trying to control, to build, to own, and to manage all states' global infrastructures and global data in common, against any local or state autonomy at all. So a global technocracy started to arch over all these factors: nearly 100 fresh weak states on one side, declining older European empires and select rising global states like China, Japan, India, and South Korea on the other side, and expanding private global commercial infrastructures in the middle.

In summary about phase 4, the point is that from at least 500/600 CE onward, the past regional systemic environmental degradation and local regional response as the dominant systemic logic began to fade with a more prominent global trading system and global-facing states inventing it after this point. This context of a global trading system and global states starts to cause a different logic of global systemic mass extinction, by undermining the dual heritage of humanity."

(draft manuscript of Mark Whitaker's Glomos book)