The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History

Part 6 examines the cosmopolitan web. From the outset, the authors establish The Development and Impact of Globalization as a major focus in the section: “Early modern globalization was a painful, sometimes brutal process. Peoples, languages, and religions vanished, while a handful of successful imperial societies spread their power and cultures to new lands” (155). Uneven power dynamics and cultural homogenization emerged as defining features of globalization. After providing evidence of the devastating impact of European expansion into South and West Africa, the Americas, Siberia, and Oceania, the authors write of European expansion into the Pacific:

The few million people involved entered into a larger cultural world, dominated by Europeans and Christianity. They also entered a political-military realm in which they enjoyed few advantages, and a microbial common market in which they had none. It was, for all the peoples of the Pacific, a greater or lesser catastrophe, as it had been for the peoples of the Americas, Siberia, and South Africa not long before, and as it had been for countless peoples long ago, obliterated or absorbed, often with no trace, in the process of creating the large metropolitan webs (177-78).

By drawing a parallel between earlier catastrophes in the creation of metropolitan webs and new catastrophes in the creation of the cosmopolitan web, the authors suggest that the dynamics of globalization were not markedly different from the ways that human societies interacted with one another in previous eras. Force and domination, as well as the interplay of competition and cooperation at different levels, remained defining characteristics of the acquisition of power.

What distinguished the cosmopolitan web from earlier webs was Atlantic Europe’s domination. The characteristics of Western European society that differentiated it from its powerful Chinese and Ottoman counterparts were the unrestrained pursuit of profit and knowledge, which fostered great instability and a lack of deference to traditional forms of authority. The outcomes of these distinct characteristics are evident in Part 6 and explain Atlantic Europe’s ascendance. The Scientific Revolution and the military revolution combined to usher in critical advancements in ship design and hardware:

By 1530, they [...] built ships tailored to the requirements of cannon, with gunports and gundecks just above the waterline. After 1550, naval and merchant ships in Atlantic Europe became structurally different, and any monarch or city-state hoping to survive on the seas had come up with the money to build warships (165).

While these advancements drew on Chinese and Muslim influences, Atlantic Europe managed to build, refine, and expand oceanic navies because they could afford to do so. The above passage illustrates the confluence of politics, privatization, commercialization, and information that granted Atlantic Europeans control of the Atlantic economy.

The destructive aspects of the cosmopolitan web are clear in the decimation of Indigenous populations, the subordination of African peoples to enslavement and high mortality, and widespread deforestation and reductions in edible wildlife. However, fusion of the world’s webs brought new constructive developments too. The printing press facilitated the rapid flow of information, while increased commercialization and urbanization ushered in religious dynamism and diversity, within the confines of the major religions. For example, greater individualism and egalitarianism emerged in the Chinese/Confucian context, while Sikhism cropped up in India and encouraged greater tolerance for Christians and Jews in the Muslim world. Europe’s Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation birthed new strands of Christianity and supported mysticism, missionary work, art, architecture, and study of other peoples and religions within Catholicism. Although the authors emphasize the loss of local religions in the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific, they also hint at elements of syncretism, which they discuss more fully discussed in parts 7 and 8.