Rossem: 60,000 Years of Globalization

My idea is that it’s a little bizarre to use the term globalization to refer to the last quarter of a century. Especially in the Netherlands, a country that has been living off a worldwide trade system since the 16th century and was the wealthiest nation in the world for two centuries because of the exploitation of that worldwide trade system, with the aid of very modern financial arrangements. That’s odd, but the experts disagree about that. There are some who say, like I do: Globalization is as old as humanity, or at least as old as Columbus, who drew North and South America and parts of Oceania into that trade system. Or not he himself, but the European expansion that followed in his wake. While the opposing standpoint is that that’s all true, but that the explosive increase in volume is so large that, using the classical Marxist dictum, quantity changes into quality, so that we should now speak of a qualitatively new development. Personally, I don’t agree with that. For me, globalization started 60,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens was so fed up with the insects and the heat that they left East Africa and at a relatively rapid speed, considering the limited technology, populated the entire world. With the exception of Antarctica, but still the whole earth. 40,000 years ago it was done. By then they’d crossed to Australia. How they did that is a mystery. But the species initiated globalization a long time ago.