From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

By Jeffrey E. Garten

Stories of ten historical figures who helped build the long road to globalization, from Genghis Khan to an Intel CEO: “Filled with brilliant vignettes.” —The Washington Post

This is the story of globalization, the most powerful force in history, as told through the lives and times of ten people who established new connections between people and nations—whether that was their primary goal or not. Rather than focusing on trends, policies, or particular industries, From Silk to Silicon views the topic of globalization for the first time through the lens of individuals and their transformative actions. It tells us who these men and women were, what they did, how they did it, and how their achievements continue to shape our world today.

You’ll read about Genghis Khan, who united east and west by conquest and by opening new trade routes built on groundbreaking transportation, communications, and management innovations; Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who escaped the ghetto and ushered in an era of global finance; Cyrus Field, who led the effort to build the transatlantic telegraph; Margaret Thatcher, whose controversial policies opened the gusher of substantially free markets that linked economies across borders; Andy Grove, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who, at Intel, laid the foundation for Silicon Valley’s computer revolution; and more.

Economist Jeffrey E. Garten finds the common links between these figures and probes critical questions including: How much influence can any one person have in fundamentally changing the world? How have past trends in globalization affected the present? And how will they shape the future? 

“Fascinating and illuminating.” —Fareed Zakaria, author of Age of Revolutions

“Garten has brilliantly updated Thomas Carlyle’s Great Man theory of history . . . A tour de force, imaginative, informative and just plain fun to read.” —Strobe Talbott, former Deputy Secretary of State

“A terrific book on globalization . . . really compelling.” —Thomas L. Friedman, author of The World is Flat

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9780062677945

Jeffrey E. Garten

Jeffrey E. Garten teaches courses on the global economy at the Yale School of Management, where he was formerly the dean. He has held senior positions in the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Clinton administrations, and was a managing director of Lehman Brothers and the Blackstone Group on Wall Street. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, BusinessWeek, and the Harvard Business Review, and he is the author of four previous books on global economics and politics.

Book preview

DEDICATION

For Ina,

Who has been the center of my life for fifty years

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

Chapter I: GENGHIS KHAN: THE ACCIDENTAL EMPIRE BUILDER: (1162–1227)

Chapter II: PRINCE HENRY: THE EXPLORER WHO MADE A SCIENCE OF DISCOVERY: (1394–1460)

Chapter III: ROBERT CLIVE: THE ROGUE WHO CAPTURED INDIA FOR THE BRITISH EMPIRE: (1725–1774)

Chapter IV: MAYER AMSCHEL ROTHSCHILD: THE GODFATHER OF GLOBAL BANKING: (1744–1812)

Chapter V: CYRUS FIELD: THE TYCOON WHO WIRED THE ATLANTIC: (1819–1892)

Chapter VI: JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER: THE TITAN WHO BUILT THE ENERGY INDUSTRY AND ALSO LAUNCHED GLOBAL PHILANTHROPY: (1839–1937)

Chapter VII: JEAN MONNET: THE DIPLOMAT WHO REINVENTED EUROPE: (1888–1979)

Chapter VIII: MARGARET THATCHER: THE IRON LADY WHO REVIVED FREE MARKETS: (1925–2013)

Chapter IX: ANDREW GROVE: THE MAN BEHIND THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: (1936–2016)

Chapter X: DENG XIAOPING: THE PRAGMATIST WHO RELAUNCHED CHINA: (1904–1997)

Chapter XI: THE BEST IS YET TO COME

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

ALSO BY JEFFREY E. GARTEN

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

From Silk to Silicon was originally conceived in an era of optimism about globalization. It was written as that optimism was eroding, and it came out at a time of full-bore pessimism about the future of global trade, finance, migration, climate, and other such issues. Nevertheless, I believe that the book’s underlying message is more important than ever—that the increasing integration of the global economy, driven by many factors including technologies that we don’t even know about yet, is bound to continue. In this book, which covers nearly one thousand years, I focus on the human contribution to globalization, particularly on ten very special people who drove globalization to heights that could never have been envisioned in their lifetimes. They did so amidst circumstances that were every bit as challenging as our era, if not more so. Indeed, the characters in this book can enhance our understanding of how globalization has evolved and how exceptional people can really change the world for the better.

Origins of From Silk to Silicon

When I first began this book, my perspective on globalization was heavily influenced by my professional experience. As an investment banker between the late 1970s and early ’90s, I helped countries such as Costa Rica, Indonesia, and Turkey restructure their debts in global markets, and I subsequently oversaw my firm’s Asian business from Tokyo. As undersecretary of commerce for international trade in the mid-1990s, I worked on negotiations to integrate emerging market nations such as China, India, and Brazil into the global trading system. As dean of the Yale School of Management from 1996 to 2005, I expanded the number of foreign students coming to my school and opened up new opportunities for studying outside the United States.

In all these positions I deepened my understanding of globalization by traveling extensively and writing articles and books reflecting my experiences. I was also taken by the enthusiasm for international trade and investment on the part of government officials and business leaders, as well as young entrepreneurs and students. I saw evidence that governments nearly everywhere were keen to adopt U.S.-type market-oriented policies. It all made me think that the trajectory of globalization would continue to follow a sharply upward incline.

These feelings compelled me to look into the phenomenon of globalization in greater historical depth, and so I began this book project. I wanted to know how the interdependence of nations evolved and how our era compared to others. I was eager to better understand the ups and downs of globalization and the forces behind those patterns. And because of a long-held interest in historical biography, I wanted to tell the story of globalization through people who gave the phenomenon a gigantic boost by virtue of their powerful ideas and their indefatigable roll-up-the-sleeves leadership.

The Pall over Globalization

While I was writing, however, it seemed as if the engines of globalization not only stalled but went into reverse gear.

In 2008, a financial crisis that began in the United States spread to every corner of the globe. In conjunction with several years of the deep recession that ensued, it obliterated trillions of dollars of capital assets and destroyed millions of lives. The world entered a long period of anemic growth and debilitating unemployment.

Moreover, the volume of trade as a percentage of global activity decelerated by more than half from the pattern of previous decades. Global trade negotiations stopped altogether, replaced by regional talks—themselves resting on tenuous political support in the United States and Europe. A significant number of new trade barriers were erected. Projections for foreign investment in factories and other hard assets around the world were being revised downward, with such capital flows among rich countries declining in 2015 by 40 percent compared to a decade before.

Interest rates reached unprecedented lows in North America, Europe, and Asia, signaling investors’ conviction that global growth would continue to be slow for a long time to come. Global banks reduced their international lending in response to escalating regulation and heightened fear of taking on too much risk, and many international banks—including Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation—closed some of their operations outside their home countries, or dramatically cut their professional workforces abroad. Scandals relating to the rigging of international interest rates and the illegal manipulation of the $5-trilliondollar foreign exchange market, together with growing concerns about tax evasion by multinational companies, cast additional doubt on the soundness of the global banking system.

While I was writing this book, the rapid economic growth of emerging market nations, including China, slowed dramatically. Powerhouses like Brazil experienced serious setbacks, and others with once-promising futures, such as Venezuela, headed for total collapse.

The prices of commodities and raw materials plummeted, deflating the many nations that exported them, from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia, and from China to Canada. Oil prices, among the most important determinants of stability in the global economy, dropped by two-thirds.

During this period, the European Union experienced extreme financial tensions over the economic implosion of Greece. The Arab spring spread like wildfire, and, almost as fast, self-destructed into counter rebellion and chaos—making it all but impossible for the region to link into the global economy except in the most tenuous way. The global refugee situation reached dire dimensions, causing unprecedented stress on the international system of humanitarian assistance. Ebola renewed fears of a global pandemic, and a few years later the Zika virus was causing new global concerns.

In the 2006–2016 period, China became a major player on the global scene in trade, finance, and military affairs. It has risen so quickly and with such force that it threatened to dramatically change the political, military, and economic global order as we have known it. At a minimum, Beijing rattled confidence in the West that trade was, on balance, beneficial.

Cyber security, barely a concept when I started my research, became a worldwide nightmare. Between 2012 and 2014 alone, the number of cyber attacks on industrial control systems around the world rose fourfold.

Environmental degradation, often pushed further by climate change, was a major feature of the times. Heat waves, coastal flooding, massive storms, sea-level rises all became more pronounced. Although these occurrences couldn’t be technically connected to climate change, many experts asserted a direct link existed.

All the while, the voices of middle-class men and women in the West whose livelihoods were affected by imports, offshoring, technological change, and deteriorating economies grew louder. No wonder. Inequality of wealth and income soared in much of the world, while wages stagnated. Reflecting the despair and anger felt by millions about the lack of economic opportunity, and also reflecting disdain for government officials and anyone else in elite circles, nationalism and populism became the political order of the day, elevating leaders throughout the West who challenged the conventional wisdom that a liberal, open global economy was, after all, in the interests of the industrial democracies. This was no small matter since that philosophy had been the foundation of Western progress since the end of World War II, and later had been widely adopted by the rest of the world after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990–91. It seemed as if a revolution in thought and action against globalization was gathering force.

No Letup

Today the clouds over globalization that emerged while I was writing this book show no signs of abating.

Terrorism has, of course, been a feature of our world since 9/11 but since this book was published, it accelerated across borders, with tragedies occurring in cities including Paris, Brussels, Nice, San Bernardino, Orlando, Baghdad, Nairobi, and Dakar.

Cyber attacks have increased dramatically and are likely to become a major component of international relations, of warfare, and of life in general in this century.

The ability of multinational companies to take advantage of different national laws in the absence of effective international regulation—most visibly with regard to taxes—promises to become a more explosive issue.

Climate change continues to be one of the most acute issues of our time, and its effects are outpacing the speed of the international cooperation needed to address them.

In the summer of 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, with uncertain implications for European integration, global financial markets, and international trade. Just how big a disruption England’s decision will be is not yet knowable, but many observers think it could be the beginning of a great unraveling of international cohesion.

In November of the same year, American voters elected Donald Trump as president, whose platform was characterized as America First. He campaigned on a variant of nationalism that was explicitly opposed to globalization, even promising to abrogate a wide swath of treaties the United States had previously ratified, and causing governments and their citizens everywhere to wonder the degree to which Mr. Trump would follow through on his campaign pledges and totally upend the cooperatively managed, rules-based global order that had gained momentum around the world since the end of World War II.

The nationalist thrust of Brexit and Trump is being emulated by leaders in Europe, in Russia, and in China, too. Analogies to the destructive 1930s are being used increasingly by commentators around the world.

Indeed, in late 2016, the leaders of international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization have been sounding the alarms time and again that governments need to address international problems and enhance coordination, or else a massive recession would ensue—or even political and military conflict. The metaphor for the times has been building walls, as opposed to building bridges.

Globalization Is Still Unstoppable

To many educated observers all these factors constitute a gigantic stop sign for the future of globalization. But I don’t buy that argument. Here is why:

The current situation . . .

I believe globalization is still the most important trend of our age, and as I show in this book, individuals have the opportunity to make a clear, positive difference in where our world is headed. When I think about globalization, the image in my head is one of a powerful freight train that won’t be derailed, no matter what obstacles are put on the tracks.

Let’s take a minute to consider how extensive globalization has become, how woven it is into our everyday lives, and how far-fetched it is to think that it could come unwound to any great degree.

This past summer I was taken by an article in Bloomberg View by Afshin Molavi about typical American activities on July 4 (which I recount here with a few additions of my own). Molavi envisioned an Independence Day holiday in which Americans’ use of commonplace goods revealed how much our everyday routines reflect global connections. He imagined someone having a Budweiser beer that, incidentally, came from a subsidiary of its Brazilian-Belgian owner called InBev; snacks from Sara Lee, whose parent company is Mexico’s Grupo Bimbo; a hot dog that was made by Smithfield Foods, a component of China’s Shaunghui; a Good Humor ice cream cone, from Unilever, a British-Dutch conglomerate.

After all that, there might be a tablet of Alka-Seltzer, which belongs to Germany’s Bayer Schering Pharma. The hypothetical American might have used his Apple iPad, designed by a U.S. company but assembled from parts all over the world. Maybe he would have watched a movie on American-owned Netflix, now in more than 130 countries, or would have hopped into his Chrysler, owned by Italy’s Fiat, to catch a movie at a cinema that happens to be owned by Dalian Wanda Group, a Chinese corporation that owns more movie theaters than any other company in North America.

Indeed, the world is much more interconnected than most of us realize. Political sentiment about globalization may have turned negative, but look what has happened in spite of that.

Let’s start with the fact that nearly 50 percent of all revenues of the U.S. S&P 500 top companies are derived from their business abroad. In addition, over the last few years, the world’s great companies have continued to merge their nationalities. In 2015, for example, America’s General Electric combined with France’s Alstom to create a transatlantic energy powerhouse. Japan’s publishing empire, Nikkei, swallowed the UK’s Financial Times. Already this year, major international deals are in the works in the beer industry, in automotive technology, in biotechnology, in chemicals, in industrial gases, in video games, and with regard to national stock exchanges. In the first six months of 2016, China invested nearly $29 billion in the United States, about 50 percent more than it did for all of 2015, much of that going to purchase U.S. companies. Halfway through 2016, Beijing’s investments in Germany also exceeded those of 2015 in number and in dollar value.

Globalization doesn’t only mean mergers. Companies such as Intel, IBM, General Electric, Apple, and Microsoft have also expanded their research operations abroad to countries including India, China, Singapore, and Israel in order to be nearer customers and technological talent. In fact, PricewaterhouseCoopers has estimated that 94 percent of all global companies now do some research and development outside their home countries.

There are many up-and-coming players on the global scene too. Multinationals from emerging markets—such as South Korea’s Samsung, Mexico’s CEMEX, Brazil’s Embraer, China’s Lenovo, and India’s Mahindra—have dramatically expanded their global reach, enhancing the international mix of goods, services, and talent.

Venture capital has gone global too, as American funds such as Sequoia or Inventus Capital Partners fund start-ups in countries such as India, China, and Israel. McKinsey & Company now estimates, in fact, that because of the Internet, some 86 percent of tech-based start-ups do some cross-border business. Not just that, but American business, so long the leader in innovation, is also adopting technology first popularized in countries such as China, like WeChat and Alipay, that facilitate mobile payments and transfers of money from person to person.

Decisions and events in one part of the world continue to have extraordinary impact across the globe. When the U.S. Federal Reserve even hints about moving U.S. interest rates, every market from Frankfurt to Mumbai to Tokyo is deeply affected. When Chinese growth slows, its excess steel production floods global markets at subsidized prices, causing industrial and labor problems all over the world.

International research consortiums that advance critical knowledge have been growing at a rapid pace. Think about the Geneva-based Large Hadron Collider, designed to explore particle and high-energy physics, among other phenomena, and consisting of the world’s largest distributed computing grid spanning thirty-six countries. Another example: The Breakthrough Energy Coalition, devoted to the production of clean energy, and consisting of the United States, France, Germany, Japan, India, Saudi Arabia, China, South Africa, Nigeria, and others.

More than ever in history, young people around the world are exchanging ideas and experiencing each other’s cultures firsthand. In 2015 six million foreign students were studying in the United States, a tenfold increase from when I started From Silk to Silicon. In the same period, the number of American students studying abroad grew from 200,000 to more than 300,000, and my own school—the Yale School of Management—concluded more than twenty partnerships with other business schools around the world, from the National University of Singapore, to HEC in Paris, to the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Chile. It is not just the United States that is a magnate for student exchange these days, either. In the last decade, foreign students studying in China reached almost 400,000 from negligible levels. Within a few years, China could be the second largest destination for overseas study next to the United States.

Tourism and travel have grown rapidly. In 2006 revenues from international tourism were $743 billion, and by 2015 they had nearly doubled to $1.26 trillion. Foreign visitors to the United States grew from 21,668,290 in 2006 to 34,419,016 in 2014, greater than a 50 percent increase.

Today more people are forcibly displaced from their homes than any time since the end of World War II. This is an unmitigated disaster, to be sure. But when these people are combined with other flows of human beings across borders—migrants and immigrants—the world is experiencing the greatest intermingling of human cultures in its entire history.

The global regulatory foundations for many activities have been strengthened—for finance, for food safety, for dealing with public health emergencies, and for transmission of data. And toward the end of 2015, an accord on climate change was concluded among 178 countries that holds great promise for cooperation on one of the most important global issues of this century.

In one major international forum after another—including the Group of Twenty nations, the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and numerous UN organizations, for example—a number of the same challenges have dominated the agendas, including inequality, sustainability, and education. More than ever before, there has been a true meeting of the minds on the nature of global problems and the priorities and the need for action. Even if progress is slow, never has the global discussion of global problems been so rich, and never have national governments devoted so much time and effort to them.

Looking ahead . . .

Trade may be slowing, but communications is not. Think of the global connections that have been made via Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Instagram, and Twitter—all in the last decade. The McKinsey Global Institute calculates that data transmission across borders has increased by forty-five times during the last ten years. Throughout history, in fact, technology has been an amplifier of globalization because it knows no national boundaries. Thus it is a sure thing that regardless of what politicians think and do, advances in medicine, 3-D printing, sensors, nanotechnology, data collection and analysis, and robots with artificial intelligence will spread as if borders hardly existed. There will be global businesses we never conceived of. When I began this book, for example, the company called Uber didn’t exist. Today it is in sixty-six countries. There was no Airbnb. Today it is in 34,000 cities in more than 150 countries. There will be research breakthroughs that will reduce diseases and increase human longevity. There will be new inventions that change the very nature of work. We cannot conceive of the extent of human progress that new technologies will bring.

Even as the pace of trade has slowed in recent years, we should not disregard the growing infrastructure for commerce, such as the expansion of the Panama Canal, new trade routes through the (melting) Arctic Circle, and the New Silk Road that China is building across the Eurasian continent. One day new channels like these will facilitate a rebound in today’s sagging trade. And we should not ignore the real possibilities of new centers of economic growth and dynamism in the world, such as Africa and the Arab Gulf.

At the same time, the last decade witnessed extensive global cross-fertilization among cities. In an era of hyper-urbanization, the great metropolises of the world—including New York, London, New Delhi, Rio, Manila, and Shanghai—are sharing ideas about new systems for transportation, telecommunications, sustainable construction, law enforcement, and much more. On another level, global financial centers such as New York, London, Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong have enhanced their cooperation through communications and corporate networks. On yet another plane, the innovative culture of Silicon Valley is being emulated in entrepreneurial hubs across the globe in places such as Dublin, Bangalore, Tel Aviv, and Seoul.

Consideration of the role that cities will play in the future of globalization raises yet another critical point about who, in addition to governments, the influential actors in the future of globalization will be. Alongside these urban players will be large nonprofit organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, not to mention social media organizations such as Facebook, with its 1.8 billion subscribers.

Nor should we forget that while nationalism, populism, and inward-looking policies may be in fashion in the West, China is busy concluding new trade agreements, India brags about its new openness, and the countries of Southeast Asia are working toward a new common market. Washington may be a reluctant funder of the IMF, but Beijing has recently established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, with forty-six founding governments, a potential rival of the existing World Bank. Asia is pivotal to the future of the globe, and could have as much influence on the course of globalization as what happens in the United States and Europe.

Nor do many public opinion polls jive with the kind of negativity surrounding the positions of so many politicians. In the middle of a U.S. presidential campaign that denigrated trade agreements in ways not seen in many generations, national polls showed that a majority of citizens favored trade and the politically toxic Trans Pacific Partnership. Sixty-five percent of Americans—just about two out of three—felt increasing connections with other countries were good for the country.

The Essence of Globalization

I believe that globalization is a highly beneficial force that enlarges the possibilities for mankind. It’s not just that it has enhanced our choices of products and services, and not just that it has allowed people of different nationalities to pool their innate talents, not just that it has contributed to the richness of our literature, our visual arts, our scientific and technological knowledge, our fundamental ideas about life. Globalization has also helped lift more than half a billion people out of deep poverty in the last few decades alone. In liberating men and women in the developing world to become producers and consumers since the 1980s, it has also afforded opportunities to billions of citizens to enter the global middle class, giving them better lives, greater freedoms, and much more promising futures. Not incidentally, these same men and women have become major consumers, providing a growing market for American companies, and they have also become a new pool of workers and entrepreneurs, giving us more products at lower prices, and increasing the efficiency of economies everywhere.

As becomes clear in this book, however, in any given era globalization can be a positive phenomenon or a negative one—and usually both at the same time. Globalization can reinforce and multiply positive trends, but it can just as easily accelerate the spread of highly damaging developments too. For example, global communications gives us almost unlimited choices through e-commerce, but it also facilitates coordination among terrorists. Global supply chains lower costs of goods and services, but they also make us increasingly vulnerable to supply disruptions from natural disasters or political interference. This duality is a theme throughout this book, but I conclude time and again that on balance globalization is a net contributor to human progress.

Here is another way to think about globalization. Globalization is about a growing connection among people of different nationalities. That could be trade that enriches exporters and at the same time clobbers companies and communities who cannot withstand the competition. Globalization is about transmission of ideas across borders. It could entail embracing laissez-faire economic policies or imposing protectionist policies. Globalization is about globe-spanning networks, be it the worldwide supply chains of multinational corporations that carry 80 percent of the world’s commerce or the social media that make it easier for drug traffickers to coordinate their worldwide activities. It is about common vulnerability, be it climate change, public health emergencies, or recession. It is, in short, about goods, services, ideas, peaceful movements, and aggressive and destructive forces all coursing through the channels that have been opening and growing for centuries. Globalization is also a mind-set, focused on confidence that open societies that let in foreign influences are good, or, alternatively, reflecting convictions that national go-it-alone policies are a better way. It’s a kind of contagion, of which there is no end of both good and bad.

For all these reasons, everything that has been happening for the last decade—even seemingly antiglobalization movements and activities that have spread from one country to another—is, in one way or another, about globalization, because it’s about the spread of ideas and techniques and tangible things, or widespread resistance to that. And for the same reasons, you can understand why globalization cannot be stopped.

The Next Phase

We need to acknowledge that the inseparable combination of globalization and technology has proceeded at a pace that has been too fast for political systems to accommodate. Too many people have been hurt by the rapid changes; the gap between winners and losers has become too big; and the laws, regulations, and institutions of society have not kept up. In addition, in a period of rapid change, millions of people have become more insecure, wishing to withdraw into the worlds they know, their families, and their extended tribes. In an ever-smaller world, a large number of them have become suspicious of other races, other cultures, resenting immigration, refugees, and the intrusion of people from somewhere else who are unlike them.

These feelings and the disorientation that surrounds them are, in my view, dangerous on many levels, but they are also understandable. The McKinsey Global Institute has said that the transformation of society is happening ten times as fast and at 300 times the scale, or roughly 3,000 times the impact of the Industrial Revolution. Even allowing for hyperbole, it is clear that we are passing from one era to another and the transition could be tumultuous. But globalization has always been disruptive; it has always left many people behind and destroyed many lives; and it has always spawned antiglobalization protests, often violent and lasting many decades. In the end, though, the world has always moved in the direction of more integration.

Looking forward, for many countries national efforts will surely be focused on improving education and job training, enhancing social mobility and reducing income disparities, and building a stronger social safety net that includes better access to health care and more secure retirement benefits. It is my hope that now and in the years ahead, the agenda for globalization will give much more priority than it has to date to helping those people who have been left behind in the progress that globalization has brought and will continue to bring.

Depending on how a new approach to globalization is handled, the outcome over the next few decades could be either frightening or encouraging. We may see a variant of the destructive nationalism that we saw in the 1930s in Germany, Italy, and Japan. But it is also plausible that our governments, individually and collectively, could focus on the all-important domestic foundations of sustainable globalization. For all the talk about international cooperation, the fact is that many of the critical decisions that underlay the global economy are domestic in origin. That includes many aspects of taxation, subsidies, education, worker retraining, banking regulation, dealing with disparities of income and wealth, and—most critically—making sure that decisions are arrived at in a fair, transparent, and democratic way. Were governments and societies to focus on that set of policies, whether we call it nationalism or populism, they could build a more confident consensus for outward-looking policies on the part of individual nations. And in that way, they might build a stronger platform for intergovernmental cooperation on trade, immigration, and other aspects of an interconnected world.

Globalization itself could also take on forms that are much different than today. In place of the trends toward democracies that we have seen these past several decades, we could be at the beginnings of a wave of authoritarian governments. Momentum for free markets could give way to state control of economies. We could return to a world dominated by a concert of major powers, as was the case in the nineteenth century. Or, globalization could take place amidst widespread chaos and disorder. In this book I have described many frameworks for globalization through the last ten centuries—gigantic kingdoms, colonial and corporate empires, eras of constant war—but nothing stopped the world from becoming smaller and more interconnected. In fact, in their own ways, every era fostered that trend.

While no one can predict the near-term, nor what may happen over the next decade or two, what is clear is that the long arc of history implies that sooner or later governments and their societies will realize that globalization is a fact of life. They will come to the conclusion that the solutions to most national problems will require more and not less global collaboration; more and not less exchange of goods, services, and ideas across borders; more and not less sensible global regulation; and more and not fewer effective international institutions. The only question is how we get there, how long it will take, and how chaotic and painful the transition will be.

I Remain Bullish

The last chapter of From Silk to Silicon is entitled The Best Is Yet to Come. When this book came out, I was often asked by interviewers how I could be so optimistic. One part of my answer was to refer to the people I wrote about and the challenges they faced. It was easy for me to show how the obstacles they confronted were at least as daunting as those that we are facing today.

Also, in presenting the case for a positive future, I could point to the fact that the big breakthroughs that each of my ten protagonists made occurred when there was a fundamental disruption of the patterns of the past, when the old rules and customs were discarded and replacements were nowhere in sight, and when everything was is in flux.

Bottom-line: History shows that the deep-seated problems that we confront today are not only challenges but opportunities.

I believe that in the future the achievements of those in this book will not just be matched, but that they will be exceeded. There are so many places to advance our civilization, including in clean energy and the environment, other essential infrastructure, public health, eradication of poverty, financial stability, job creation, education, and more effective governance of countries and international institutions.

The talent pool from which to draw will be bigger than ever before, given advances in the spread of knowledge and information, and the ease of financing great projects. Our global human pathfinders will not just come from the most powerful countries of the day, but from the cities and countryside of nations all over the globe—the favelas outside Rio, the inner cities of Nigeria, the remote islands of Indonesia, the new schools of Kazakhstan. New leadership will also surely come from the half of the world’s population who heretofore have been heavily disenfranchised—women.

More than ever, therefore, I think it’s crucial to reflect on the historical context to appreciate where we have been and where we are going, and to understand why the past is a prologue to what lay ahead. That was the original purpose of From Silk to Silicon, and it remains so in this new edition.

November 30, 2016

For reference notes concerning this preface only, please visit www.jeffreygarten.com. All other notes for this book can be found here.

INTRODUCTION

This is the untold story of globalization. It focuses on ten people who made the world smaller and more interconnected. Among those whom you will meet: a desperate teenager who rises from the steppes of central Asia to build the largest land empire in history; a producer of fancy paper products who advances global communication beyond anything achieved in human history; a cognac salesman who engineers the most far-reaching experiment ever attempted to dissolve national borders; a refugee from both the Nazis and the Soviets who leads the computer revolution; and others with similarly remarkable lives. Their accomplishments were not only spectacular in their own eras but continue to shape our world today. In the following chapters I have described who they were, what they did, the improbable journeys they took, and what they had in common. I have also shown how they remain relevant to some of the great global challenges of our times.

Most of us have a basic understanding of globalization, the good and the bad. We’ve seen how expanding trade can lead to more economic growth, lower prices, greater choice, and new jobs, but also how it undermines existing jobs. Many people have benefited from new investment opportunities in companies and countries around the world, but we’ve also seen the devastation that comes with international banking crises. We are enriched by cultural and educational exchanges but feel threatened by the spread of terrorism across borders. Every day we experience the ups and downs, the benefits and threats of a more interconnected world. Globalization, however, is anything but a recent phenomenon. It started about sixty thousand years ago, when some 150,000 people walked out of Africa in search of food and security. Over many millennia, these men, women, and children migrated to every part of the world. They intermarried. They traded. They spread and mixed their ideas, religions, and cultures. They fought wars and built empires that brought different populations under political roofs that sometimes spanned whole continents. They created cities that became melting pots of nationalities. They developed technologies and improved communications among themselves. They formulated laws, standards, and treaties governing their growing interdependencies. The story of globalization is no less than the story of human history.

I believe globalization is among the most powerful forces in the world and will become even more so in the decades ahead. It will reshape industries, change the way we work, alter our climate, enrich our cultures, and pose excruciating challenges to governments at all levels—from creating enough good jobs in the face of hypercompetitive trade to dealing with international cyber attacks against our critical infrastructure.

Why read yet another book on the subject? After all, many writers have dealt with globalization from a perspective of sweeping forces such as war, trade, and migration. Globalization has been analyzed by examining international industries such as textiles and oil, and by chronicling specific events such as financial meltdowns and tsunamis. Many books ask whether globalization is beneficial or harmful, and whether it should be encouraged or better controlled. To my knowledge, however, globalization has never been seen through the lens of a small number of people whose heroic deeds gave it a gigantic boost. This is a fundamental omission, for understanding the central personalities of our past constitutes the flesh and blood of history. If we don’t focus on critical individuals, we leave out the difference that men and women make when they select one course of action over another. We forfeit the ability to measure contemporary leaders against those who came before them. It would be as if we were studying a war without delving into the motivations, the decisions, the triumphs, and the failures of the top generals. In fact, it is the rich combination of impersonal circumstances and human action that makes digging into world history so compelling.

In From Silk to Silicon I selected nine men and one woman who met several criteria. First, they had to be transformational leaders. Put it this way: they had to virtually change the world. Many great leaders accomplish something with a big transaction of some kind—they win a big war, they negotiate a major treaty, they persuade a head of state to follow a new course. However, these are not necessarily transformational accomplishments. To achieve that status, leaders have to operate on a more exalted plane, as did the men and the woman I’ve written about here. Transformational leaders do not exchange one thing for another, nor is their achievement the outcome of a bargain or negotiation, nor did they invent any one thing. Instead, they opened doors to a broad array of possibilities for progress. They changed the prevailing paradigm of how society was organized. They raised the hopes of broad swaths of civilization. They opened highways on which many others could travel.

I also identified people who could be characterized as first movers, those who initiated or were in on the ground floor of a powerful, fundamental trend or movement that had an outsize impact on the world. In fact, each of my characters can be identified with having ushered in a critical phase of globalization—for example, the exploration of new lands and the search for new treasures, the expansion of governing ever-wider territory, the lowering of barriers to communication and commerce, the spread of new technologies and industrial processes across the world. Another way to think about the individuals in this book is to envision them as the inaugurators of various eras of world history: the Age of Empire, the Age of Exploration, the Age of Colonization, the Age of Global Finance, the Age of Global Communications, the Age of Energy and Industrialization, the Age of Global Philanthropy, the Age of Supranationalism, the Age of Free Markets, the Age of High Technology, and the Age of a Resurgent China. One of my characters led every one of these ages.

My subjects also had to be doers and not just thinkers, people who rolled up their sleeves and made something of global significance happen. Thus I stayed away from great philosophers such as Karl Marx, noted scientists such as Marie Curie, or economists such as Adam Smith—important as these people were. We often give too much credit to the power of ideas and not enough recognition to the importance of effectively implementing them on the ground; indeed, generating the purely intellectual breakthroughs is frequently the easy part of great transformations.

None of my characters are saints, to be sure, and several in particular had dark sides and created considerable suffering in their wake. Among the individuals here, you will find some whose efforts to conquer and dominate new lands were brutal if not barbaric, some whose drive to explore and trade involved expanding the heinous institution of slavery, some whose economic and social policies had the unintended effect of tearing apart the fabric of communities and wrecking countless lives. On balance, however, I believe the totality of each person’s contributions to the world was decisive in driving globalization to higher plateaus.

I began my search in the twelfth century, when the first great age of comprehensive globalization was dawning, symbolized by the revitalization of the ancient Silk Road. I concluded with the end of the twentieth century, when the third industrial revolution, based so much on the silicon chip, was gathering momentum and

Reviews for From Silk to Silicon

[idiopathic-374092 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great choices of thinkers who were doers

I learned a lot even in the communications and technology fields I have already read a lot about. The author writes well about the great ark of history.

[publiusdb-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives, Jeffery Garten offers a brief history of globalization over the course of humanity's history. It's an enjoyable jaunt through the last thousand years, and while Garten's approach is less that of a historian and more of a layman's, his broad strokes make the book accessible.

In contrast to other books on globalization, which focus on the forces of war, trade, and migration, From Silk to Silicon examines ten individuals of whose "heroic deeds" gave globalization a "gigantic boost" towards interconnectedness.  Each individual is chosen for their role in making the world smaller and more interconnected, spanning a period commencing with Genghis Khan in the twelfth century up until the present.  Each individual was transformational, were "first movers" in their field or arena and thus had an outsize impact, and was a doer (in contrast to a thinker). None were particularly saints, but Garten sees their impact as, in totality, unambiguously positive.

Without a doubt, the stories he tells--the lives he describes--are fascinating. Here is Genghis Khan, who rises with ruthless brutality and genius to dominate the steppes and then the entire landmass from China to Iraq, followed by Henry the Navigator, a desperate royal son without a kingdom to inherit, the first to begin to explore the coast of Africa (and to introduce slavery of its population to the world). Robert Clive ekes out the British Empire almost single-handedly from India, while the Rothschilds rise from the Frankfurt Jewish to become the first international bankers. Then there's Cyrus Field, who lays the first telegraph across the Atlantic, shrinking the world from the distance crossed in weeks by sail-power to just the minutes necessary for semaphore to travel telegraph lines. John D. Rockefeller creates the modern energy industry, while also becoming the archetype for modern philanthropy, and Andrew Grove, a Jewish refugee from war torn central Europe, goes on to make Intel the most influential creator of chips that drive the Information Age. Garten's group isn't complete without politicians, either: Margaret Thatcher is here, as well as is Jean Monnet and Deng Xiaoping.

Anyone of them could, and has, spawned their own biographies, and Garten makes no attempt to pose as a replacement for these. Rather, From Silk to Silicon feels like an entry-level examination of the impact an individual can have on the future of human endeavor and the increasingly interconnected world. No, they weren't validations of the "great man theory of history," says Garten. They were as much a product of their time as they were influential in shifting the course of events. "The people in this book were of their time and they made their time," Garten writes. "They steered history only insofar as they seized the opportunity that contemporary circumstances afforded them."

In closing, Garten asks whether the world is becoming too complex for a single individual to continue to make the kinds of contributions that the ten individuals he discusses have made. He sees the challenges faced by his ten protagonists as no less formidable than those we face today. They, like us, lived in revolutionary times. And yet, the complexities of the modern world are not too much for the emergence of another in the types of Khan, Thatcher, or Rockefeller. To each, their age must have been complex to the time, and it is the ability to take advantage of shifting circumstances, identify a major problem, and attack it at the weakest point that will create the next transformational leaders.