1.how does this article define globalization andsome key detailsabout it; reflect on them;

2.are they complimentary or contradictory definitions?

3Do they all seem to have a place or do some cancel others out?

4.Do yousee what a huge phenomenonglobalizationis when you look at all the definitions together?

Slaves, Germs, and Trojan Horses

By: Nayan Chanda

Letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Castile after his first voyage to the New World, 1492 From The Four Voyages, ed. and trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1969: 58).

It was an unbearably hot summer night at the English port of Dover. As the next days papers would report, 18 June 2000 was the hottest day of the year. Five officers of HM Revenue and Customs at the Dover Eastern Docks Ferry Terminals waited for the midnight ferry fromZeebruggeto pull into the quay. Hours earlier, when the ferry had left the Belgian port, they had received a faxed manifest of the trucks it had on board. Most of the truckers that plied this route were familiar, well-established companies hauling goods between the Continent and Britain. That night, one manifest caught the officers' attention.

The listed cargo of tomatoes was unremarkable, but the carrierVanDer SpekTransportationwas not one that they had heard of before. Even more curious, the ferry charge was neither prepaid nor charged to a credit card. The truck driver, it seemed, had paid cash at the ferry counter atZeebrugge.Such anomalies tend to raise suspicions about the contents of the cargo. Hidden among boxes of onions or fruit, customs officers often discovered undeclared crates of liquor or cartons of cigarettesthe usual high-value commodities smugglers try to sneak into England.

So when VanDerSpek's white Mercedes truck rolled down the gangplank to stop near the customs checkpoint, it was not waved through after a cursory look at its papers. While some officers went to talk with the driver, another went behind the refrigerated truck to open the steel doors and look inside. He noticed that the truck was oddly silent. There was no hum of a generator to keep the produce properly chilled. The only sounds were the snap and slide of the bolt on the door and the swoosh of suction as the officer loosed the door from its seal and swung it open. A rush of warm, putrid air immediately blasted his senses. In the dim light he saw overturned crates of tomatoes and the outlines of two human figures gasping for breath. Behind them, deeper in the shadows, half-naked bodies lay in heaps on the metal floor. The officer did not realize that he had chanced on one of the most gruesome discoveries of human trafficking in modem Europe. He shouted for his colleagues.

A forklift truck was brought in to help unload the crates of tomatoes that hid a shocking scene. "There were just piles and piles of bodies, it was absolutely sickening," one officer later told reporters. Fifty-four men and four women of "oriental" appearance found that night were later identified as illegal immigrants from China. Lured by the prospect of the good life in the West, they had paid traffickers thousands of dollars to embark on a long, tortuousand ultimately fataljourney across Russia and Eastern Europe. One of them was nineteen-year-old Chen Lin, who had regularly called his mother back in China throughout the harrowing voyage across the continents. In his final call home, he had told her that in a few days, he would be in Britain, where a cousin had already made it.1

Like thousands of slaves from Africa who perished during the journey across the Atlantic two centuries ago, Chen and his compatriots were the latest victims of one of the most noxiousndtragic aspects of globalization: the international trading in human beings. In 1495, Christopher Columbus had organized the first-ever shipment of slaves to reach Europe. Despairing of finding any sizable quantity of gold in the New World, he organized an armed expedition to capture Indians from the island of Hispaniola. Exactly 505 years before the customs officers' shocking discovery in Dover, a vessel carrying 550 Native Americans left for Spain in February 1495. Favorable winds made the journey relatively swift by the standards of the day. But by the time the ship reached the island of Madeira, two hundred of the slaves had died of the cold.2

The transatlantic east-to-west slave trade received a boost in the seventeenth century with the arrival of large-hulled ships and the desire for cheap labor to exploit the virgin soil of the New World. For more than two centuries, African slaves were transported across the Atlantic in these specially constructed vessels that could pack up to 450 people sardine-like, shackled to the floor, in their large hulls.3 During this dreaded month-long Middle Passage (which began with capture and forced march to Africa's Atlantic shores and ended with auction sales of slaves to new owners), as many as four in ten died of disease, thirst, or hunger. The bodies of the unfortunate were unceremoniously dumped overboard in the waters of what was known as the Ocean Sea.

Unlike in the previous era, however, they had not been kidnapped by slave traders to be sold in auctions for plantation owners. Slavery was abolished in most places by the late nineteenth century. Yet opportunistic middlemen found no shortage of hopeful and vulnerable would-be immigrants to prey on for profit. The emergence of inexpensive and faster mass travel in the 1970s had brought new opportunities for human traffickers to deliver cheap and often bonded laborers to employers in countries thousands of miles away. The clandestine nature of such operations meant that the comfort and speed of modern-day travel would be sacrificed for the sake of more furtive and dangerous journeys in the hidden compartments of ships and trucks.

Poverty and despair at home, combined with the dream of a better life in Europe, led the fifty-four Chinese to the door of modern-day slave traders. Instead of the land-owning masters in the New World, who bought slaves as chattel, many European and American businesses of the modern era turned to illegal immigrants to meet their need for low-cost labor. Instead of being kidnapped from their villages to be sold abroad (although that has also happened), the unfortunate Chinese immigrants had paid about thirty thousand dollars each to international human traffickers known as "snakeheads" for the covert voyage that ended in tragedy.

The Chinese formed, however, only a small part of the growing wave of illegal immigrants from all over the world flocking to Europefrom the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Congo, Iran, Iraq, Romania, Sri Lanka, and the former Zaire. In 1999 alone, some seventy-one thousand persons illegally entered Britain and sought asylum. According to a CIA report, another forty-five to fifty thousand women and children were trafficked to the United States that same year out of the seven

hundred thousand to two million women and children who were trafficked globally.4 The number of immigrants trying to enter the United States illegally has continued to rise, as has the casualty rate. According to a Wall Street Journal report, since 2000, an average of about four hundred immigrants have died each year trying to enter tire United States illegally across the Mexican border. That compares with about 240 people who died trying to cross the Berlin Wall during its 28-year existence.

The same cocktail of economic disparity, power imbalance, and desire for profit that once drove the slave trade across continents is still the intoxicating elixir of the slave trade today. As Jesse Sage, a spokesman for the American Anti-Slavery Group, puts it, " Whether it is Bangladeshi toddlers trafficked into the United Arab Emirates or Chinese children smuggled into Los Angeles by snakehead criminal gangs, there is a lucrative trade in human beings. Our global economy creates demand for cheap goods and there is no cheaper labor than slave labor.

The expanding economic connections among human communities, pushed by traders and propelled by consumer demand, have created an increasingly interdependent world. Imperial aggression brings far-flung communities under one ruler and produces today's interconnected world. Both of these agents of globalizationtraders and warriorshave in the same process brought suffering, upheaval, and heartaches. From the beginning of human connections through warfare or trade, slavery has been an important component. Winners took back captives as slaves, and traders profited by trafficking in humans across the borders. The fact is that the process of globalization has always had a dark side. As the tragedy at Dover demonstrates, nothing has changed. In fact, with technology now speeding the process, the noxious effects of global interconnectedness may also spread and accelerate. The dark shadow falls not just on human trafficking. Both warfare and commerce have long transmitted pathogens, bringing catastrophic pandemics. That threat continues and speeds up as global trade and travel intensify. In this chapter we will see examples of how these negative consequences of globalization have evolved and how ever-faster communication and commerce have brought in their train new threats hackers releasing destructive computer viruses, criminals stealing credit card numbers and personal information from personal computers hooked to cyberspace. The speed and ease that globalization has brought have come with a price tag.

THE OLDEST TRADE

Adam Smith saw slavery as an aberration. The Scottish economist lamented in 1776 how the beneficial new trade between Europe and the New World was spoiled by the rapacity of slave traders: "The commodities of Europe were almost all new to America, and many of those of America were new to Europe. A new set of exchanges, therefore, began to take place which had never been thought of before, and which naturally should have proved as advantageous to the new, as it certainly did to the old continent. The savage injustice of the Europeans rendered an event, which ought to have been beneficial to all, ruinous and destructive to several of those unfortunate countries."8 The fact is, however, that although the scale and brutality of Atlantic slavery were unprecedented, slavery was, in the words of a Dutch historian, the "oldest trade" in the world. As David Christian has put it, the masters considered slaves as "living batteries, as human cattle." The importance of human beings as a source of energy helps explain why forced labor was so ubiquitous in the premodern world.9 Many forms of slavery existed centuries before the word slave came into formal existence. People's insatiable search for wealth and drive for profit, combined with power imbalances between human communities, led to the growth of a system that reached its peak in the early nineteenth century and has since profoundly altered human civilization.

The word slave was coined in reference to the widespread enslavement of central European Slavs in the ninth century. This group constituted the main target or "resource" population for the Viking-Arab trade in the Middle Ages. Male and female "heathen" Slavs who had not yet been converted to Christianity were seen as objects, fair game for trading. From the beginning of history, war, famine, falling personal fortunes, and natural disasters have compelled people to leave their homes to find work elsewhere or accept bonded work to survive. In some cases, this has meant performing hard or dangerous tasks that could be assigned to slaves, whom Aristotle called "human instruments."10

Stripped of their humanity, such "working machines" were treated no better than draft animals to be bought and sold like other commodities in the marketplace. But unlike chattel, slaves brought their own races, languages, and cultures to venues far removed from their places of birth. Like migration, the slave trade brought face to face different branches of the human race that had dispersed since the ancestors left Africa more than fifty thousand years ago. The intermixing of people and their slaves (and of migrants and settlers) over the millennia has transformed the size, shape, and color of the human community and its cultures. We have seen how Egyptians' first contact with Africans in the third millennium b.c.e. led to the procurement of slaves for the pharaoh. Bartering human beings for other commodities began early in human history.

The first-century-B.c.E. historian Diodorus famously observed that Italian merchants could purchase a slave from Gaul in exchange for alcohol ("a crock of wine for a young slave boy"). Indigent parents sold their offspring to traders or handed them over to repay debts, and authorities sold convicted criminals. And of course, prisoners of war were the greatest source of able-bodied slaves. Cimon, an Athenian naval commander who fought against Persia in 468 b.c.e., sent twenty thousand prisoners to the slave market.11 A primary occupation of these slaves was digging the earth with bare hands and stone tools for precious metals like silver. The ore played an important role in the rise of Athens. In the mid-first millennium b.c.e., silver mining in the Balkan-Aegean world employed tens of thousands of slaves and required a large-scale, well-organized slave trade. Slaves were also needed to fight as soldiers. Silver provided the means to fund wars like those Athens fought against Persia and Sparta, but the slaves themselves often were enlisted as soldiers to supplement the troops.

THE SLAVE: SOLDIER, LABORER, COMPANION

The anonymous author of the famous first-century-c.E. account of ocean trade Periplus of the Erythraen Sea mentions slaves as routine merchandise in Roman trade. They were imported for manual labor as well as for entertainment such as singing and companionship. The Roman author Martial mocked Caelia, who, although Roman, consorted with various foreign men, presumably slaves: "Your Egyptian lover sails to you from Alexandria, the dark-skinned Indian one from the Red Sea." But slaves were traded from both sides of Indian Ocean shores. Ancient Indian literature offers evidence of the rich owning Western slaves who may have come from the Greco-Roman world.12 Tribute sent to the Chinese imperial court by neighbors frequently included slave girls and performers such as acrobatic "twirling girls" from Central Asia.

The Slavic population of parts of central Europe furnished the largest number of humans for sale to the Romans. While the Roman aristocracy enjoyed the high life, for the common folk life was nasty, brutish, and short, especially in south- central Europe. With their high mortality rates and low life expectancies, societies with larger populationshistorians call them "population reservoirs"became natural targets for slavers. In addition to Slavs, Greeks, and Persians, the Germanic, Celtic, and Romance peoples inhabiting lands in the north of the Roman Empire and people from sub-Saharan Africa formed the main reservoirs for those who traded in human flesh.

As the Roman Empire demanded more and more slaves to work the plantations and serve the aristocracy, the kidnapping and trading of slaves grew apace. The Greek geographer and historian Strabo wrote that ten thousand slaves could be loaded and unloaded at the Delos docks in a single day. In order to prevent solidarity (early trade unions, perhaps) or unrest among the enslaved, slaves of diverse ethnic origins from different parts of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean were intentionally combined.13 (Interestingly, nearly two millennia later the Portuguese slave traders followed a similar course of action in supplying African slaves to Brazil. The policy was "not to allow too many from one tribe to be collected in either the whole of Brazil or in any of its captaincies, so as to avoid possible ill consequences." Despite those precautions, one tribe from Sudan organized a series of revolts.14) As the Roman Empire extended from the Atlantic Ocean to the Euphrates in the first two centuries of the Christian era, the large foreign slave population in Rome turned it into "a world in miniature." Rome was the center of the slave trade, and its victims from all over the world brought with them the dress, speech, customs, and cultures of their native countries.15 Over time, intermarriage among slaves, and between Romans and slaves of different races, produced a new mixture of people.

For the succeeding millennium, slavery remained a common feature of societies around the Mediterranean, all the while growing in scale. Although slavery for domestic production in Europe was gradually supplanted by serfdom in the eleventh century, mining and farming became more reliant on slave labor due to international trade and increasing demand.16 In the ninth and tenth centuries, Viking and Russian traders took slaves from the eastern Slavic states to Moorish Spain and North Africa as domestic servants, soldiers, and mine workers. Slave trading was not confined to Europe and the Middle East. According to seventh-century Chinese sources, slaves were brought from Zenj (sub-Saharan Africa), and by 1119 the ownership of black slaves was a mark of wealth in Canton.17 Slavic household slaves were a common sight in the Italian city-states as late as the fourteenth century, as were African slaves in sixteenth-century Spain and Portugal. Eric Wolf notes that much of the wealth of Venice came to depend on the trade in slaves. Although slaves could not be sold at public auctions in Venice after 1386, they continued to be sold by private contract through the sixteenth century.18

In the Middle East, slaves were often trained to perform as entertainers, craftworkers, and soldiers.1' For the Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad, slaves were brought in from all over Europe, as well as sub-Saharan Africa. Female slaves, who were mostly from the Middle East or India, received a lot of attention, and their relative merits were the subject of comment in contemporary accounts. One report, almost like a product review, compared slaves of different origin and concluded: "The idea

156PARTIII CULTURES AND HISTORIES

female slave was of Berber origin, left her country at age nine, spent three years at al-Medina, three in Mecca, and then went to Iraq at sixteen to acquire some of that country's culture. When resold at twenty-five, she combined the coquettishness of al-Medina, the gentle manners of Mecca, and the culture of Iraq."20

As Arab traders ventured deeper and deeper south along the Indian Ocean coast and into West Africa, slaves from sub-Saharan Africa emerged as a major traded item. The Prophet Muhammad himself had slaves, and he authorized the owning of slaves in certain conditions. In Arabic the word for black, abd, became synonymous with slave. As early as the year 652, the Christian kingdom of Nubia (todays Ethiopia) signed a treaty with the Abbasid caliphate to supply the Abbasids three hundred slaves a year. The arrangement continued for six centuries.21

Some of the African slaves imported into the Abbasid empire (part of today's Iraq) were enrolled in the infantry, but more were put to work in large-scale production of sugar or in farm labor.22 Landowners in ninth-century Basra brought in several thousand East African slaves to drain the salt marshes in what is now southern Iraq, hoping to turn the marsh into breadbasket. The slaves' anger at their hard labor and minimal subsistence erupted into one of the earliest known black slave revolts, whenAli ibnMuhammad, a Persian who claimed descent fromAli,the fourth caliph, and Fatimah, Muhammad's daughter, won the support of slave work crews by promising them freedom and equality under his brand of Islam. For fourteen years, the African slave, called the Zanj, joined by Africans in the caliphate's infantry, sacked Basra and kept the power of the caliphate at bay in parts of southern Iraq and eastern Persia. They were eventually crushed by the caliph's Egyptian-backed army.23 Despite their eventual defeat, the Zanj nevertheless shook the honor of the caliphate by exacting terrible revenge. As one contemporary historian described it: "Ali's soldiers were so outrageous as to auction off publicly women from the lineage of al-Hassan and al-Hussein and al-'Abbas [meaning descendants of'Ali ibnabi-Talib and the ruling Abbasids] as well as others from the lineage ofHashem,Qureish [the Prophet's lineage], and the rest of the Arabs. These women were sold as slaves for a mere one or three Dirhams, and were publicly advertised according to their proper lineage, each Zanji receiving ten, twenty, and thirty of them as concubines and to serve the Zanji women as maids."2''

Military slavery came to play an important role in the Abbasid empire as the Abbasids grew concerned about recruits from the unreliable, independent-minded Arab tribal armies and began to enlist slavesfirst blacks from Africa and later mostly horse-riding Turks from Central Asia. Although it is difficult to calculate the number of military slaves in the employ of the Arab empire over the centuries, one scholar estimates it to be into the tens of millions.25 So deep-rooted was the practice of slavery in the Middle East that it persisted in Saudi Arabia into the 1960s.

THE SLAVE-SUGAR COMPLEX

When European Crusaders arrived on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean in the twelfth century, they found a delicious product sugarbeing grown in plantations with slave labor. Sugarcane originated in the Pacific islands before reaching

CHAPTER 12 Slaves, Germs, and Trojan Horses 157

India, which remained the source of that luxury for the Mediterranean world. Before then, Europe's craving for sweets was being met by sugar beets. The rise of Islam and intensified trade with the Arab world introduced sugarcane cultivation into the Levant. Italian colonies, especially Cyprus, became the principal sugar suppliers in Europe. Italian entrepreneurs in the eastern Mediterranean soon developed the so- called slave-sugar complex, an elaborate method of growing sugarcane and transforming it into sugar, made possible via the large-scale use of slaves. It became the earliest model of the system transplanted to the New World three centuries later. In this early capitalist model, land, capital, and labor were combined in a way that allowed profit to be maximized. Slaves, writes Barbara Solow, were not only "a new. improved factor of production, like a new kind of machine... [but] slave labor could be held as an asset in the portfolio of the slaver."26

Italy's experience in Crete, Cyprus, and later Sicily had shown how plantatior slavery combined with exports could turn virgin lands into an enormous wealthgenerating enterprise. When the Portuguese discovered the uninhabited Atlantic islands of Madeira in 1425, they followed in Italy's footsteps and introduced slave- sugar plantations. Slaves were raided or bought from the West African coast anc harnessed to growing sugar to be sold in Europe. Other Europeans soon picked uf the sugar-slavery model in use in Madeira,SoTom,and the Canary Islands.

On his first voyage across the Atlantic, Columbus stopped in the Canary Island: for repair and had the opportunity to see firsthand how slave labor was being usee in sugar plantations. Although he was disappointed not to find the spice or gold h< had sought in Hispaniola, he did not miss the opportunity to appropriate free laboi As he wrote to the Spanish court: "I must add that this island [Hispaniola], as well a. the others, belongs to your Highness as securely as the Kingdom of Castile. It onb needs people to come and settle here, and to give orders to the inhabitants who wil do whatever is asked of them.... The Indians have no weapons and are quite naked They know nothing about the art of war and are so cowardly that a thousand of then would not stay to face three of our men ... they need only to be given order to b made to work, to sow, or to doanything useful."27

Columbus was the first slaver to send a group of slaves from the New Work back to Europe, but the direction of this traffic across the Atlantic quickly reversed The pressing need for labor to develop the boundless resources offered by the Nev World had to be met from Africa, and thus did the transatlantic slave trade take ofl Europeans came to realize that not only did slavery offer a highly profitable mode for producing exportable commodities but trading in slaves was itselfa lucrativibusiness. The British learned that the Portuguese method of military raids togralslaves could be costly; they sought instead the more profitable tactic of bartering with African chiefs to trade commodities for people.

In 1562-63, John Hawkins led Englands first slaving voyage to Sierra Leone returning with three vessels loaded with three hundred slaves and other goods.2 Despite running the gauntlet of Spain's monopoly in the slave trade, he raised ; hefty profit selling the slaves in Spain's Caribbean islands. News of his expeditioi displeased Queen Elizabeth, who denounced it as "detestable." But after realizing the scale of profits to be reaped through the slave trade, she had a change of hear

158PARTIII CULTURES AND HISTORIES

and ended up investing in Hawkins's next slaving expedition. By carrying slaves from Portuguese Africa to Spanish America, Hawkins challenged the Iberian monopoly. Other slavers soon followed, and the path was laid for slavery-based commerce in the New World.

Supported by a steady stream of imported slaves, the Portuguese colony of Brazil eclipsed Madeira to emerge as the worlds leading sugar producer. In 1513 the king of Portugal sent the pope a pompous gifta life-size image of the pontiff surrounded by twelve cardinals and three hundred candles all made of sugar.29 From 1575 to 1650 Brazil supplied most of Europe's sugar and imported significant quantities of manufactured goods and African slaves. Slaves were later employed to grow coffee plants introduced from French Guyana, where coffee had arrived after journeying across the world from Yemen to Sri Lanka and Indonesia. A seemingly inexhaustible supply of slave labor and endless plantations turned Brazil into the worlds top coffee grower. Thesemitropicalcoastal lands of Peru and Mexico offered the Spaniards land to develop sugar plantations and vineyards. Rich silver minesworked by slaves in northern Mexico and Boliviabecame a great source of wealth for Spain, as well as currency for international commerce. African slaves working in Brazil's diamond and gold mines added to the glitter of the Portuguese empire. The British, French, and Dutch made a fortune from sugar, coffee, and cocoa plantations in the Caribbean and from cotton and tobacco plantations in North America. The prosperity of European colonial powers and the rise of international trade that forged the creation of an interdependent world were based on the ruthless exploitation of African slavesan estimated twelve million of whom were brought to the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.30

Rumblings against slavery in the New World first circulated among the Quakers in Philadelphia as early as 1688, and nearly a hundred years later English Quakers submitted the first important antislavery petition to Parliament. The growth of an evangelical-based, powerful philanthropic movement in England accompanied the rise of laissez-faire thinking and growing opposition to protectionism in the late eighteenth century to intensify opposition to slavery. The rise of the British Empire in Indiawith its vast population and resourcesand the declining importance of the Caribbean also lent weight to the argument to abolish sugar-slavery. In 1807, Parliament passed the first anti-slavery act, prohibiting trade in African slaves. Ten years later, Britain and Spain signed a treaty in which Spain agreed to end the slave trade north of the equator immediately and south of the equator in 1820. The treaty gave British naval vessels the right to search for suspected slavers. Thanks to loopholes in the treaty, however, slave trade continued unabated until 1830, when another Anglo-Spanish treaty officially banned slavery in most of Central and South America.