A T-shirt sold in Chicago may contain cotton grown in Texas, spun into yarn in China, sewn in Bangladesh and shipped in a steel box across two oceans. Globalization is the growing connection of places through flows of goods, money, people and ideas. It is often described as new, but long-distance trade routes have shaped the map for thousands of years. What has changed is the speed, the scale and the cost.
Old routes
The term Silk Road was coined in 1877 by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen to describe overland routes linking China with Central Asia, Persia and the Mediterranean. In practice there was a web of routes rather than one road, and silk was only one of many goods: paper, horses, glass, religions and diseases traveled too. Oasis cities such as Samarkand grew rich on their situation along it.
The Indian Ocean was an even larger arena. Sailors there relied on the monsoon winds, which switch direction with the seasons, blowing from the southwest in summer and the northeast in winter, so that ships could cross the ocean on a predictable timetable. Arab, Persian, Indian, Malay, Chinese and East African traders linked ports from Kilwa to Calicut to Guangzhou. After 1492 the Columbian Exchange connected the Americas with the rest of the world, moving crops, animals and diseases on a scale never seen before. It transformed diets on every continent, and the Atlantic slave trade was its most terrible part.
Chokepoints
Ships still carry most of the world's traded goods by volume, and they are funneled through a few narrow passages. A chokepoint is a narrow passage through which a large share of trade must pass, which makes it both valuable and vulnerable. The Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and Indonesia carries a large share of the trade between East Asia and the rest of the world. The Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf carries roughly a fifth of the world's oil. The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, and the Panama Canal, opened in 1914, cut thousands of kilometers from voyages and changed the relative location of whole regions.
The box that changed the world
The most important trade technology of the twentieth century may have been a simple steel box. In 1956 the American trucking entrepreneur Malcom McLean sent the converted tanker Ideal X from Newark to Houston carrying 58 containers. Containerization means shipping goods in standard boxes that move between ships, trains and trucks without being unpacked. Before it, dockworkers loaded cargo piece by piece, and a ship could spend days or weeks in port. Containers slashed loading times, costs, theft and damage, and made it cheap to split manufacturing among many countries. They also emptied old city docks and cost many dockworkers their jobs.
A shrinking but spiky world
Cheaper transport and instant communication have made distant places feel closer. The geographer David Harvey called this time-space compression, the sense that the world is shrinking as travel and communication speed up. Some predicted the death of distance, but the evidence points another way. Economic activity has become more concentrated, not less, in a few great city regions, because the agglomeration economies discussed in the cities level still reward being in the right place. The urban theorist Richard Florida argued in 2005 that the world is not flat but spiky, with peaks of innovation surrounded by valleys.
Production is now organized in global value chains, also called commodity chains. A global value chain is the set of stages, spread across countries, through which a product is designed, made and sold. The highest profits tend to sit at the two ends of the chain, in design and branding and in marketing and retail, while the assembly stages in the middle earn least. Economists explain this with comparative advantage, the reason trade can benefit both sides. Geography adds that gains and losses land in particular places: a factory town that loses its plant does not live on national averages. In 2013 the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment building near Dhaka killed more than 1,100 workers, a reminder that people at the cheap end of the chain bear risks that shoppers rarely see.
Worked example: the Ever Given
In March 2021 the container ship Ever Given, one of the largest in the world, ran aground in high winds and wedged itself diagonally across the Suez Canal. For six days the canal was blocked. More than 300 ships queued at either end, and some turned around to sail the long way round Africa, adding well over a week to the voyage. Shipping analysts estimated that the blockage held up roughly 9 to 10 billion dollars of goods for each day it lasted.
The episode illustrated every theme of this level at once. A chokepoint proved vulnerable precisely because it was so important. Supply chains timed so tightly that factories kept almost no spare parts felt a delay in Egypt within weeks in Europe and beyond. Since late 2023, attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have again pushed many vessels around Africa, showing that the map of trade can shift with politics as well as with accidents.