2000 BCE–300 CE: (The Commercial Revolutions as the Foundation of All Subsequent Global History — The Rise of the Several Commercial Revolutions of the Secon…

2000 BCE–300 CE: (The Commercial Revolutions as the Foundation of All Subsequent Global History — The Rise of the Several Commercial Revolutions of the Second and First Millennia BCE Having Had Central Importance for the Course of All Subsequent Human History, Setting in Motion Already Three Thousand and More Years Ago the Trend Toward Linking Up More and More Portions of Africa-Eurasia, the Routes of Trade Even in the First Millennium BCE Becoming Conduits for the Spread of Ideas and Belief Systems as Well as Commodities Technology People and Potentially Diseases): For all these reasons, the rise of the several commercial revolutions of the second and first millennia BCE had central importance for the course of all subsequent human history. They set in motion, already three thousand and more years ago, the trend toward linking up — even if indirectly and through intermediaries all along the way — more and more portions of Africa-Eurasia. The routes of trade even in the first millennium BCE had become the conduits for the spread of ideas and belief systems as well as commodities, technology, people, and, potentially, diseases. This is the summation of the chapter’s argument, and it is a quietly devastating revision of the standard narrative of globalization. The conventional story begins with the European Age of Exploration in the fifteenth century — with Columbus, da Gama, Magellan — as if the linking of the world’s civilizations were a European achievement of the modern era. Ehret demonstrates that the process began three thousand years earlier, driven not by European navigators but by Levantine merchants, Garamantean traders, Aksumite entrepreneurs, Malagasy sailors, and the countless intermediaries who connected West African gold mines to Mediterranean markets, Indian Ocean spice routes to East African ports, and Southeast Asian rice paddies to Malagasy highland terraces. The globalization of the fifteenth century CE was not the beginning of the process. It was the completion of one that had been under way since the second millennium BCE — a process in which Africa had been a central participant from the very start. The routes of trade that the Portuguese “discovered” in the fifteenth century had been operating, under African and Asian management, for two thousand years.