Word: chanda
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...global reach, whose adherents tramped from one end of the earth to the other, saving souls. To be sure, in their zeal to convert, missionaries often mixed faith with cruelty, as Spain's blood-drenched conquest of Mexico in the name of God abundantly proved. But as Nayan Chanda of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization argued in his recent book Bound Together, the great religions were also intimately associated with the growth of trade and human contact. "For all the horror it visited upon people," wrote Chanda, "missionary activity had the effect of shrinking the world...
...story of the Koan fakes is one of many in Nayan Chanda's Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization. While most of us consider globalization to be a purely contemporary phenomenon - conjuring up images of multinational coffee chains and multilingual call centers - to Chanda it is as old as humanity itself, and as complex and unpredictable. It "has worked silently for millennia without being given a name," writes the author, a former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review now at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. And it moves through "a multitude...
...Chanda's essential ideas - that globalization has been a gradual historical process and that we are connected to the past - are hardly the stuff of dazzling scholarly insight. But his encyclopedic survey of the forces and events that have connected individuals, societies and cultures is nimbly paced and punctuated by lively anecdotes - of catamarans plying Polynesian seas, of Catholic converts in Mexico bearing icons made in Macau of missionaries martyred in Japan, and of the armless boy in an Indian trade delegation who awed imperial Rome by shooting arrows with his toes...
...Chanda also draws plenty of parallels with our own day. It's hard to tell whether these comparisons are contrived, elucidative or banal, but they mostly entertain in the way that popular history can. For example, he writes that today's sprawling multinational corporations are modeled on the crown-backed trading houses of England, Portugal and Holland, whose empires themselves followed a continuum stretching back to the ancient kingdoms of Mesopotamia. He contends that the silver and gold bullion mined in Mexico and Peru and shipped across oceans in galleons by the conquering Spanish preceded the convertible currencies and credit...
...same Western powers that bombarded their way into foreign markets and countries now, of course, quiver behind their own protectionist ramparts in fear of cheap Chinese goods, for the processes of globalization are continuously evolving. Indeed they have now "outpaced our mind-set," Chanda warns. Petty tribalism still hampers our thinking, preventing concerted international action on a whole host of dangers such as climate change, the threat of viral pandemics and mass humanitarian crises. How much better, says Chanda, to have the geopolitical and economic grasp of the 16th century Portuguese trader and diplomat, Tomé Pires, as he gazed...