By Jim Clifford
The map below drew a lot of attention on Twitter when I posted it a few weeks ago in advance of a presentation I gave at an environmental history conference in early July. It was retweeted, not just by friends and fellow environmental historians, but also by Shawn Donnan, a World Trade Editor at the Financial Times. I think it gained traction because it helps visualize something historians and students who take our classes know, but might not be general knowledge: globalization did not begin in the late 20th century with the rise of industrial economies in Asia.
Extensive trade networks predate Columbus and the flow of silver from mines in the Americas through Europe and to China linked and transformed the world economy during the Early Modern period. The scale of global trade and communications has changed significantly over the centuries, but globalization has very deep roots.
Far reaching industrial supply chains date back to the nineteenth century and in a few cases further back. British industrial development relied on importing raw materials from all over the world. Britain was simply too small of an island to supply all of the materials required by the growing factories and it did not have the climate to produce many of the materials required by innovative new industries. By the second half of the nineteenth century many of the products consumed and produced in London originated overseas. These included soap, candles, bread, margarine, marmalade, rubber rain jackets, leather shoes, inks, dyes, paints, fertilizers, and wooden furniture. These consumer goods were manufactured in factories in the Thames Estuary from raw materials imported, as the map above shows, from Canada, the United States, Jamaica, Peru, Brazil, Spain, West Africa, India, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and New Zealand, among many other locations. You can zoom into the map and click on locations to see the range of commodities sent to Britain (the locations are rough approximations, as most of the underlying data is at the national level).
Identifying and following industrial supply chains is difficult enough in the present and it is even more complicated for the nineteenth century. I’ve found a lot of information in British archives, but these sources only get me so far. The internet, however, makes it possible to find, organize and read digitized government reports, newspapers, and books from a wide range of sources. Continue reading