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Told in an even-toned prose rhythm that adventurers of yore might have used, as they sat around campfires under starlight, regaling either family or fellow-travellers with tales of exotic, faraway lands to be encountered on the high seas or across mighty passes, the narrative sets out to inform, entertain, and demonstrate the truth of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. And it succeeds with an effortlessness that belies the years of keen research that have gone into it. Chanda roots his narrative in the "out-of Africa" thesis that is now being increasingly accepted as the truth of human origins – that we are all descendents of a single group of people, numbering perhaps as low as 150, who walked out of the Africa some 60,000 years ago and began to migrate all over the world. As the groups divided, procreated and kept moving on, they, or should we say we, reached every corner of every continent and island, taking on new characteristics of feature and colour that today constitute racial distinction. Civilisation as we know it of course is much younger. Traders were buying obsidian for use in scythes in the eight millennium BCE, and by the sixth millennium, there are records of clay tablets and script use. By the fourth millennium there was trade between India and Mesopotamia, and the horse had been domesticated. It is an exciting story, the kind that if told well, changes your perception and feeling about the world we live in. While gems and spices were the objects of exotica, coffee and cotton became the first truly globalised goods, originating in one place but soon grown almost everywhere. The story of these commodities is a lesson in how goods, technologies and commerce and indeed, culture, cross borders. The story of mathematics is equally exciting, whetting the appetite for more than the brief sketch that Nanda can accommodate. Indian astronomers, who had learned from the Greeks, developed the concept of Sunya, the zero, which later reached Baghdad. Mohammed ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, using what he refers to as "Hindu numerals" starts using the zero and creates equations. The word "algorithm" comes from his name, and the term "algebra" is from his book Al-jabr wa-al-Muqabilah. The zero gained currency in Europe, and in the 1600s saw the era of Isaac Newton and the invention of calculus, laying the foundation for much of modern technology. The book’s Adam Smith-like thesis is that "globalisation is a process propelled by many actors in pursuit of their own interests." Nanda’s actors, apart from the traders andIndeed, the "greed and envy" of empire building, aggressive campaigns of Islam and Christianity, the disease-carriers, the slave-runners, and sundry exploiters, get their due in the book. For many, the history of globalisation can only be the history of human exploitation, and Chanda attempts to come to grips with this problem. Here Chanda is not entirely satisfying, though it is not for want of effort. He essentially wants to send out a positive message, in spite of the depressing assessment from the president of the US National Foreign Trade Council that he quotes: "the message that globalisation is a good thing has fallen flat and no longer resonates. Not enough people believe it anymore." Nanda emphasises the role that governments now have to play in ensuring that short term politics does not hold sway over actions for long-term gain. So what we have from the former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, currently with the Yale Centre for the Study of Globalisation, is a paean to globalisation, warts and all, and a fervent hope that as we are bound together, we will eventually find ways to allow the common good to triumph. And that will be an even better story to tell, even if it will take a few decades more.
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Journalist-academic Nayan
Chanda has produced a sweeping, highly readable epic narrative of a
globalised human civilisation that has always been bound together, much
before it articulated for itself a concept of "globalisation."