For many years the word “globalization” was used as shorthand for a promised utopia of free trade powered by the world's great centers of technological and financial innovation. But the celebratory note has worn thin. The word is now increasingly invoked to explain a widespread recoiling from a cosmopolitan earth. People in many countries are looking nostalgically backward, toward less connected, supposedly more secure times.
But did such an era ever exist? Was there ever an unglobalized world?
The question struck me during the final hours of the American election, when I happened to be traveling by ferry in the Maluku archipelago of Indonesia. Once known as the Moluccas, this corner of the world is considered remote even within Indonesia. Two time zones removed from Jakarta, it straddles one of the most seismically volatile zones on earth；many of its islands are active volcanoes rising steeply out of the sea. In size they range from small to minuscule. Surely if ever there were a global periphery, it would be here.
Yet for millenniums these islands have been at the forefront of global history. This is because their volcanic soils have nurtured two miraculous trees, which grew nowhere else on earth：One is Syzygium aromaticum, which produces the clove, and the other is Myristica fragrans, of which nutmeg is the seed and mace the seed's lacy outer covering.
For thousands of years these spices were among the world's most sought-after commodities, making the sultans of the “Spice Islands” famously wealthy. Cloves from around 1700 B.C. have been found at the site of a settlement in Tell Ashara, Syria. To get there, they would have had to travel more than 6,000 miles, through the ports of the Indian Ocean and overland through Mesopotamia. At every stop, their price would have multiplied hugely, In Renaissance Europe, the value of some spices was thousands of times more than at their point of origin.
The Republic of Venice possessed a virtual monopoly on the spice market in the Mediterranean for centuries. Although pepper and ginger, mainly from India, accounted for the bulk of the cargo, cloves, nutmeg and mace from the Molucca commanded much higher prices by weight.
It was in hopes of bypassing Venice and the Middle East that the monarchs of Spain and Portugal funded the great voyages of the age of discovery. The Portuguese mariners who pioneered the sea route to the Indian Ocean brought with them not just their religion but also the prevalent European faith in monopolies. This notions was alien to the trading cultures of the Indian Ocean, where the rulers of the major ports had always vied with one another to attract as great a variety of merchants as possible. The Portuguese, and the Spanish, Dutch and English who followed them, were unheeding of these traditions：They never veered from their quest for monopolies, especially amid the vulnerable islands of the Moluccas.
A murderous, decades-long struggle ensued in which the competing European powers were pitted against one another, as well as the people of the Moluccas. In the process the English gained their first Asian possession, a pair of tiny islands, Ai and Run, part of a Moluccan chain called the Bandas.
In the end it was the Dutch who won, but at the cost of atrocities that included an attempted genocide. In 1621, on the orders of the Dutch East India Company's governor general, some 14,000 of the Banda Islands' estimated 15,000 inhabitants were slaughtered or taken into slavery. Two years later, officials of the Butch East India Company beheaded 10 Englishmen in what is known as the Massaacre of Amboyna.
Although the bloodshed sealed the Dutch hold on the East India, the British did not relinquish their claim to the island of Run until several decades later. So eager were the Dutch to get them out of the Moluccas that in 1667 they agreed to an exchange in which the English gave up their claim on Run in return for the recognition of their right to territories that included another island on the far side of the planet - Manhattan.
