Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
This is Karl Moore of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
I'm also an associate fellow at Green Templeton College at Oxford University.
Today we'll be talking about the origins of globalization,
going back and look at the Assyrian, Phoenician,
and Greek and Roman Empires,
to understand what international business was, back then. And to argue that globalization,
what we call 'known world globalization',
or in Friedman terms 'globalization 0.5',
existed in the Roman Empire.
That we'll show that, back in the times of the Roman Empire,
that there was quite an active degree of trade and foreign investment that
spread from China through India down into North Africa and up throughout Europe.
Key players included Rome, of course,
as well as India and China,
so that's what we're going to be arguing.
This is based on David Lewis,
who is an historian who lives in California, and myself,
our latest book, Origins Of Globalization,
which is published by Routledge in 2009.
0:56
We generally view that there was two eras of globalization.
First, the British and other European centuries of colonization of 16th, 17th,
18th centuries where the UK,
France, Spain, Portugal, Germany,
Belgium were the main players that went around the world,
to the four corners of the world and established colonies from
a viewpoint of getting resources, of sending their immigrants.
This is an era that we saw globalization open up in a new way different from the past.
Well, that's what historians argue.
We see a second era of globalization which really took place
since World War II, American led,
but also with strong Japanese, European,
and today Chinese involvement as multinationals go around the world.
What we're arguing is that there, actually,
was a third era of globalization that took place long
before that of the European colonizing powers.
That of ancient Rome,
what we call known world globalization.
We call it known world globalization because it doesn't include US,
Canada, Mexico, South America, Australia,
and countries which are quite important players
these days in terms of what we think about when we think about globalization,
so we call it known world globalization.
That's a very centric view of the world,
but that's the way the world was back then.
Thomas Friedman is a best-selling author who writes
