1 Globalization beyond the Silk Road: Writing Global History of Ancient Economies

Abstract

Ideas about premodern globalization are easily conjured when thinking about connectivity and economic development across the territories of ancient empires. Indeed, globalization has immense rhetorical power. According to evocative usage of the term, this three-volume handbook speaks to the imagination of ‘the global’ in various ways. It can be considered global in its geographical scope, spanning the vast masses of land and water of Afro-Eurasia. It can also be termed global in its temporal scope, examining 600 years of economic development across several conventional periods. In scholarship, too, these volumes have a global character, with its execution by scholars from different parts of the globe, some with global biographies, who not only work with a plethora of evidence from widely distributed regions, but also with the legacy of various historiographical traditions that developed across the globe. In all of the above, ‘global’ seems to be a convenient word that creates a powerful impression – surely, a global one – of the breadth, expansion, and immense scale of the topic and undertaking of this handbook, to the level of common wisdom. Indeed, globalization and related lexical constructions such as ‘globalism,’ ‘global connections,’ ‘global processes,’ and ‘global-local interactions,’ have become rhetorical tropes in recent practices of ancient history, in particular with regards to ‘Silk Road history.’ But some reflection on this common wisdom of the global is necessary. How global is global? What does it mean to write global history of ancient economies? How does this relate to globalization and in what way can globalization help to advance modern sense-making of ancient economies? In assessing these questions, this chapter has two related aims. The first is to provide the theoretical context of globalization, engaging with the historiography of global writing and globalization research. Despite the increasing ubiquity of globalization rhetoric in historical studies, there is a persistent “collective unwillingness to think”1 about what exactly constitutes globalization. Different usage abounds, with different meanings and different interpretive implications, but often without adequate engagement with the vast swathes of globalization literature.2 The