China's Super Consumers: What 1 Billion Customers Want and How to Sell it to Them

Chapter 4The First Globalization

It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the laws of gravity.

—Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations

The enlargement of the East-to-West movement of people, goods, and ideas that started during the time of Alexander the Great, and that peaked with the Mongol expansion of the Silk Road, marked the first period of globalization.

After a relatively isolationist period (450 to 1000 CE) following the fall of Rome, Europe was weak in commerce, power projection, and standards of living—truly the Dark Ages—while China flowered and flourished as we have seen previously.

Europe began its reemergence as a center of the arts, science, commerce, and standard of living (though it would take nearly 500 years) by two important events, both of which would lead to European and Western dominance from about 1500 to the early twenty-first century.

The first was one of the bloodiest chapters in human history. Launched by Pope Urban in 1096, the Crusades were ostensibly efforts to retake the Holy Land from the Muslim conquerors who had ruled over them for 400 years, as well as an effort to stop Arab and Muslim expansion into Europe.

The truth was that the pope was contending with multiple crippling issues including war in Germany; conflict with France; a war with the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry the IV; and the question of who had the right of investiture (appointing bishops), popes or kings.

A mass pilgrimage and/or ...