The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History

The book describes the process of globalization through human webs, offering a novel way to consider how modern political, economic, cultural, and environmental dynamics have emerged. In the Introduction, the authors establish globalization as a major theme: “Today, although people experience it in vastly different ways, everyone lives inside a single global web, a unitary maelstrom of cooperation and competition” (5). This suggests that globalization has varying impacts across the human community, conferring greater power and advantages to some while subjugating others to weaker and subservient positions. The expansion and integration of webs show how these inequalities take shape.

In Part 3, the text notes that “trading and raiding connected” (49) pastoral, agricultural, and urban peoples to one another in western Eurasia, necessitating the professionalization of soldiers to protect cities from mobile pastoralists, who could easily assemble raiding parties. This created a minority of city folks and pastoralists who had much greater power than the agricultural majority, demonstrating the origins of a small but powerful elite. Moreover, the majority’s survival became dependent on their subordination to the powerful urban elite. This arrangement has characterized human societies across subsequent millennia.

Globalization constitutes replication of the pattern on the largest scale, as shown in parts 6-8. For example, Part 6 discusses how the Industrial Revolution quickened globalization while simultaneously concentrating power and wealth in nations with the resources to industrialize. As a prime example of the urban-agricultural arrangement, the text cites Britain’s head start on the Industrial Revolution, which enabled it to outcompete many other countries in industrial production, allowing Britain to not only shift those countries primarily to agricultural production but colonize them as well. Part 8 notes that the US’s emergence as a superpower gave it great influence over the global market and, consequently, over other governments’ policies. The introduction of multinational corporations and short-term capital dictated policy in smaller, weaker nations.

Therefore, the text shows that the seeds of globalization dynamics were sown in earlier periods, before the global web emerged, and those dynamics have always involved inequality and the majority’s compliance with a small but powerful elite to survive. The difference throughout the ages is in where the center of power lies.