The Silk Road: A Lecture on the Origins of Globalization

What can medieval trade routes tell us about the mechanisms of globalization?
Long-distance, indirect trade had carried Asian spices to Europe for
nearly four thousand years. However, while physical goods easily
passed across cultural boundaries, information about such things as
the sources of the spices proved more difficult to transfer.  By
focusing on the globalization of knowledge, and the processes that
enabled it, rather than just the trade in physical goods, the
importance of shifting types of human organization and contact becomes
more clear.   The direct contacts enabled by the Silk Road were one
part of the solution to improved information exchange. Initially,
though, the impact of travel and direct trade along Silk Road was
muted because of the notoriously secretive trading partnerships that
carried out the bulk of the trade.  However, the creation of the first
large scale trading companies in 13th century Florence created a new
demand for knowledge to guide the activities of their many employees
and formed a community in which sharing knowledge and knowhow about
Asia was encouraged.  These firms’ voracious appetite for knowledge
and their ability to gather, depersonalize, and record it signals an
important turning point in the history of globalization and provides a
model for understanding the process of globalization in more recent
history.

Bio: Matt holds a Ph.D. in the History and Organizational Behavior
from the University of California, Berkeley and is presently a
Management Scientist and Co-director for the Center for Applied
Network Analysis at the RAND Corporation.