When Did Globalization Begin? Some world historians attach
globalization big bang' significance to 1492 (Christopher
Colombus stumbles on the Americas in search of spices) and 1498
(Vasco da Gama makes an end run around Africa and snatches
monopoly rents away from the Arab and Venetian spice traders).
Such scholars are on the side of Adam Smith who believed that
these were the two most important events in recorded history.
Other world historians insist that globalization stretches back
even earlier. There is a third view which argues that the world
economy was fragmented and completely de-globalized before the
19th century. None of these three competing views has explicitly
shown the difference between trade expansion driven by booming
demand and supply within the trading economies (e.g., the
underlying fundamental, population growth), and trade expansion
driven by the integration of markets between trading economies
(e.g., the central manifestation of globalization, commodity
price convergence). This paper m