This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on August 26, 2019 - September 1, 2019

To understand what is happening with the global trade war, we need to ask the question: when did globalisation begin?

Most Western historians put the date at 1492, when Christopher Columbus discovered America in trying to find the Atlantic route to China. But that is essentially a Western explanation of globalisation.

Walking through the Hanoi Museum of Ethnography last week, I could not help wondering why Africa masks resemble Poly-

nesian masks and sculptures, or why Bolivian ikat textiles from South America have similar designs and patterns as Indonesian tie and dye textiles. There are enough alternate histories from archaeologists that human cultural interchange networked the world much earlier than 1492.

As more and more global data becomes available, we can now piece together a less Eurocentric view of globalisation.

The Latin America economic historian and philosopher, Andre Gunder Frank, has argued in his book Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (University of California Press, 1998) that we must see the world as a connected whole. His earlier book in 1993 had asked. “World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand?” If the world economy was formed much earlier, then Samuel Huntington’s 1993 book, The Clash of Civilizations (1993), is really about a defence of Western civilisation against the “re-orientation of the world”, led by the resurgence of the East.

Western historians typically refer to the source of their wisdom as Greek philosophy and science. But much of their sources on Greek books, lost to them during the Dark Ages, came to them from the Arabs, particularly from the Islamic libraries and scholars in the Levant, Sicily and Andalusia (Spain). One tends to forget that Islamic rulers occupied the Spanish peninsula for 781 years (711 to 1492 AD). The Christian crusaders fighting in the Holy Land between 1095 and 1453 learnt much of their war technology, architecture, science, mathematics and history from Arab sources.

Indeed, it was the fall of Constantinople (today Istanbul) to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 that cut off the lucrative trade between Europe and Asia. That drove the Venetians to Portugal and Spain, financing their search for access to the East Indies trade. Christopher Columbus achieved the discovery of America in 1492 on behalf of the Spanish, whereas the Portuguese first rounded the African Cape of Good Hope to reach India by 1498.

Eighty years earlier, the Chinese Ming Dynasty was rich and technologically strong enough to field seven ocean expeditions led by Admiral Zheng He to as far as the Eastern coast of Africa.

As Andre Gunder Frank bluntly put it, before 1800, “the Chinese Ming/Qing, Indian Mughal, Persian Safavid and Turkish Ottoman empires had greater political, economic and even military weight than Europe.” Indeed, Arab caravans linked the markets of China to those of India via the Central Asia Silk Road, whilst Arab dhows dominated the maritime Silk Road via the Malacca Straits to Europe via the Arabian Gulf.

He argued that Europe got its superior position “no thanks to any kind of European ‘exceptionalism’ of rationality, institutions, entrepreneurship, technology, geniality, in a word — of race.” His thesis was that “Europe used its American money [from silver, gold and sugar] to muscle in on and benefit from Asian production, markets, trade — in a word, to profit from the predominant position of Asia in the world economy”.

However, despite their earlier weaker position, competition within Europe between England, Holland, France and Spain created the business model to exploit the wealth of America. Spain gained huge wealth from the gold and silver extracted from Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. During the 16th century, the English pirates profited by raiding the Spanish treasure galleons in the Atlantic Ocean. This forced the Spaniards to ship their silver via the Pacific Ocean to Manila, thus creating the silver dollar that financed the trade for Chinese porcelain, tea and silk.

In the meantime, the English pirates profited even more by shipping African slaves for the Caribbean sugar plantations and later, the North American cotton and tobacco plantations. Thus, the rise of the British empire was founded less on technology, and more on the global slave and piracy trades.

However, no one can deny that from 1648 onwards, after the end of the bloody Thirty Years War, Europe began its path of competition and scientific discovery, thus paving the way for the Industrial Revolution. Having tasted the super profits of colonisation in America, by the mid 18th century, the British and French began seeking hegemony in India, the Spanish and Portuguese were dominating Latin America, and the Dutch were taking over in South Africa and Indonesia.

By 1776, the same year that Adam Smith wrote his treatise, The Wealth of Nations,  the US had declared Independence. Thereafter, Britain consolidated her hold on India, using the wealth of India to consolidate the British empire and compete with the rise of America and her European rivals. Indian historian Utsa Patnaik recently used two centuries of tax and trade data to show how Britain extracted nearly US$45 trillion from India between 1765 and 1938.

Essentially, the proceeds from Indian exports in cotton and other goods were banked in London, bringing down Indian GDP from nearly 24% of global GDP in 1700 to only 4% by 1950. During the same period, the Opium wars and internal decay caused the Chinese GDP to fall from 22% to slightly under 5% of world GDP. Towards the end of the 19th century, the Ottoman and Persian empires were dismantled by the Western powers to exploit the newly discovered oil resources.

In short, the European (including US) dominance of the global economy emerged only significantly in the last two centuries after 1820 through a combination of colonisation and technology, not a “normal” state of long-scale global affairs.

Led by the Japanese during the Meiji Reformation, Asia began to relearn technology through the opening up of their economies. Since the end of the Second World War in 1945, the pendulum has again begun to swing back towards the East. Today, roughly

800 million rich, mostly white Americans and Europeans are facing growing competition from at least four waves of one billion plus populations from China, India and the Muslim community ranging from North Africa to Indonesia and Africa.

No wonder the rich West is feeling increasingly insecure as the rest of the world is converging in terms of income, wealth and technology. Why the world will diverge once again through new trade, currency and technology wars will be the story told in future articles.

Tan Sri Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective

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